2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) | 2019
Open-Ended Novice Programming Behaviors and their Implications for Supporting Learning
Abstract
Though support for learning computing in schools is growing, many children still begin learning to program without formal support in open-ended programming environments. While researchers have evaluated the final code of these types of projects, we know little about how users’ behaviors and usage of support tools relate to understanding. We ran a study where participants had open-ended programming time with access to one of two support tools: suggestions or tutorials. Participants then completed four tasks which required understanding of the suggestion or tutorial content. We did not find an effect of suggestions compared to tutorials on knowledge application, but we did find that many participants who performed better tended to explore more of the interface, code behaviors, and support tools. Our results suggest that future tools for encouraging learning during open-ended programming should likely focus on supporting users who tend to explore less on their own.