Open-ended programming engages students by connecting computing with their real-world experience and personal interest. However, such open-ended programming tasks can be challenging, as they require students to implement features that they may be unfamiliar with. Code examples help students to generate ideas and implement program features, but students also encounter many learning barriers when using them. We explore how to design code examples to support novices' effective example use by presenting our experience of building and deploying Example Helper, a system that supports students with a gallery of code examples during open-ended programming. We deployed Example Helper in an undergraduate CS0 classroom to investigate students' example usage experience, finding that students used different strategies to browse, understand, experiment with, and integrate code examples and that students who make more sophisticated plans also used more examples in their projects.
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This content will become publicly available on March 7, 2025
Idea Builder: Motivating Idea Generation and Planning for Open-Ended Programming Projects through Storyboarding
In computing classrooms, building an open-ended programming project engages students in the process of designing and implementing an idea of their own choice. An explicit planning process has been shown to help students build more complex and ambitious open-ended projects. However, novices encounter difficulties in exploring and creatively expressing ideas during planning. We present Idea Builder, a storyboarding-based planning system to help novices visually express their ideas. Idea Builder includes three features: 1) storyboards to help students express a variety of ideas that map easily to programming code, 2) animated example mechanics with example actors to help students explore the space of possible ideas supported by the programming environments, and 3) synthesized starter code to help students easily transition from planning to programming. Through two studies with high school coding workshops, we found that students self-reported as feeling creative and feeling easy to communicate ideas; having access to animated example mechanics of an actor help students to build those actors in their plans and projects; and that most students perceived the synthesized starter code from Idea Builder as helpful and time-saving.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917885
- PAR ID:
- 10528558
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400704239
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1402 to 1408
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- open-ended programming planning block-based programming novice programming
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland OR USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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