Michelle Ichinco

Designing a community to support long-term interest in programming for middle school children

To facilitate long-term engagement in programming for middle school children, we developed the Looking Glass Community. The Community includes both a website and integrated access to community resources within the novice programming environment, Looking Glass. We discuss how we designed the Community to support engagement by providing a source for initial ideas, support for learning new skills, positive feedback, and role models.

Towards generalizing expert programmers' suggestions for novice programmers

Novice programmers may lack the experience to recognize opportunities to either improve their code or apply unfamiliar programming constructs. Yet, these opportunities are often clear to an experienced programmer. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study investigating 1) the potential value of the suggestions experienced programmers make to novice programmers and 2) the ways experienced programmers envision identifying other programs that would benefit from the same suggestion. The results of our study suggest that experienced programmers make suggestions that can introduce new programming constructs to novice programmers. The participants in our study most commonly made suggestions that improve the code quality of novice programs, rather than changing their output. Furthermore, experienced programmers could often state a simple heuristic rule to use in identifying other novice programs that would benefit from their suggestion. Participants were able to author the rules in pseudocode, mostly using combinations of iteration and comparison to find patterns of problematic code. However, based on a test implementation of a selected set of rules for these suggestions, we conclude that support for improving rules through review and community input will be valuable.

Online community members as mentors for novice programmers position statement

While online communities exist surrounding blocks programming environments, they do not support the type of feedback a novice programmer might receive in a classroom setting. We propose a feedback system in which experienced programmers author feedback and programmatic rules to distribute feedback to novice programmers. Finally, we outline three main considerations for designing systems for online community feedback for novice programmers: community members, the format of the feedback, and how the feedback is distributed at a large scale.

An exploratory study of the usage of different educational resources in an independent context

There are a variety of learning resources with the potential to support children in learning programming independently. While many of them have been evaluated in laboratory settings, we know little about how children choose to use these resources on their own. We conducted a study organized around a film festival to explore childrens open-ended use of four different learning supports: tutorials, code puzzles, in-application documentation and code suggestions. The study began with a workshop to introduce the programming environment and available tools, continued through two weeks of home use, and culminated in a film festival. Results suggest that participants leveraged in-context forms of help most frequently, but valued documentation for question-answering and suggestions for opportunistic learning.

Towards crowdsourced large-scale feedback for novice programmers

I propose a crowdsourced large-scale feedback system for novice programmers powered by experienced programmers, or code reviewers (who I will refer to as “reviewers”). Reviewers have two jobs: making suggestions to improve novice programs and authoring rules that generalize when a program should receive their suggestion. A rule is a heuristic program that can be run on a novice program to determine whether the system should present the suggestion to the novice programmer. For example, imagine a novice program that contains a certain method call repeated three times in a row. A reviewer might suggest to improve the program by replacing the three identical method calls with a loop. The reviewer would then author a rule that checks whether code in other novice programs also contains repeated lines of code. If the rule determines that a novice program does have repeated code, the system would present the suggestion to the novice programmer to use a loop by showing an example of correct loop usage.

Semi-automatic suggestion generation for young novice programmers in an open-ended context

Independent novice programmers in open-ended contexts rely on help systems to support their learning. These help systems are often laboriously hand-authored by experts. This paper describes a semi-automatic process for the creation of a suggestion-based help system. We demonstrate and evaluate the potential utility of our approach within a blocks-based programming environment for children. With less human effort per suggestion, our approach generated a set of suggestions comparable to a hand-authored set and a set of original suggestions. We ran a study to explore the number and types of suggestions children received, accessed, and used. In 30 minutes, children on average received 9 suggestions, accessed 2.6 suggestions, and inserted 0.8 new concepts from suggestions.

Towards block code examples that help young novices notice critical elements

The frequency of programmers attempting to use code examples has prompted significant research on code examples for text languages. Yet, few systems address issues in novice use of examples in blocks programming languages. Research has begun to explore the difficulties novices have using examples in blocks programming languages. This work addresses one such issue: novices often do not notice or focus on the important elements in examples. This work-in-progress poster presents lessons learned on how to design examples that help novices notice critical elements.

Towards better code snippets: Exploring how code snippet recall differs with programming experience

Programmers of all experience levels attempt to leverage code snippets with varying success, often as reminders or to learn new skills. To date, little work has explored the specific elements within code snippets that are challenging for novices. Comparing how novices and experts recall code snippets may expose what code elements programmers focus on and inform new approaches for improving examples for inexperienced programmers. We conducted a study, inspired by past novice-expert studies, in which we asked everyday, occasional, and non-programmers to study and then recall code snippets. The key distinctions and similarities in the types and locations of recalled tokens provide insight for a set of recommendations that could improve the presentation of code snippets.

The need for improved support for interacting with block examples

Programmers often attempt to use example code in order to fix bugs, learn, and remind themselves of code concepts. Many existing programming environments make text code examples available for the common programmer. Blocks code examples are typically less available within programming environments and harder to re-appropriate, especially for novices learning independently. This position statement suggests ways of making example code more available and useful to novice programmers in blocks programming environments.

Suggesting and supporting examples for novice programmers

Computer science education has recently begun expanding in middle and high schools, but many students still do not have access to computer science education in a classroom [1]. As a result, many children learn programming outside of formal education using novice programming environments and games such as Scratch [2] and Code.org [3].