From barriers to learning in the idea garden: An empirical study

Abstract

Abstract-How can end-user programming environments better help their users overcome programming barriers? We have been investigating an approach called Idea Gardening, which addresses this problem by helping end users to help themselves overcome barriers in the context of "doing". In this paper, we report on a qualitative empirical study of how effectively an Idea Garden prototype helped end users overcome programming barriers in the CoScripter environment, and the extent to which participants learned after interacting with our features. Our results showed that 9 out of 10 participants who encountered barriers and then used the Idea Garden, overcame their barriers. Further, all 9 went on to demonstrate evidence of having learned the programming concepts, patterns, and strategies relevant to overcoming these barriers.

Principles of a debugging-first puzzle game for computing education

“…The algorithm design barriers are barriers that novice programmers encountered in end-user programming environments while designing algorithms [7]. The learning phase barriers are a sequence of barriers that novice programmers encountered when learning to program [16].…”

“…Participants showed better understanding after helpers explained that if statements run code in sequence, and that when statements takes over control whenever its condition is satisfied, independent of where it is in the code. [7], KO ET AL. [16]).…”

Towards Understanding Successful Novice Example Use in Blocks-Based Programming

“…All of these systems aim to either make it easier to select an analogous example for a certain problem or attempt to suggest a useful example. Only one system that we know of, the Idea Garden, actually frames example use as analogical reasoning [40]. In the Idea Garden, analogy is introduced as a strategy for overcoming barriers, but the analogy was used mainly for selecting an example to use.…”

“…Systems have added annotations as a way of supporting example use. Generally, these annotations either provide general descriptions of the code as a whole [15,40] or provide specific information about certain parts of the code [16,30,41]. Other systems support programmers in integrating example code into programs, essentially removing the need for programmers to create mappings in order to use an example to solve their problem.…”

“…We selected this type of annotation because it is used in other systems and example work [15,40]. We believe brief summaries could be useful in solving programming tasks because they can help a user to understand the overall behavior of the code, which could help with forming mappings and solving tasks.…”