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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2012 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) pp. 59 - 66
Main Authors Cao, Jill, Kwan, I., White, R., Fleming, S. D., Burnett, M., Scaffidi, C.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.09.2012
Subjects
Calculators
Context
Educational institutions
end-user programming
Idea Garden
learning
Problem-solving
Programming
Tutorials
Web pages
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Summary: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.
ISBN:1467308528
9781467308526
ISSN:1943-6092
1943-6106
DOI:10.1109/VLHCC.2012.6344483