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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. 

Our researchers seek to support students in building block-based programming projects that are motivating and engaging as well as valuable practice in learning to code. A difficult part of the programming process is planning. In this research, we explore how novice programmers used a custom-built planning tool, PlanIT, contrasted against how they used storyboarding when planning games. In a three-part study, we engaged novices in planning and programming three games: a maze game, a break-out game, and a mashup of the two. In a set of five case studies, we show how five pairs of students approached the planning and programming of these three games, illustrating that students felt more creative when storyboarding rather than using PlanIT. We end with a discussion on the implications of this work for designing supports for novices to plan open-ended projects. 

Analytics about how students navigate online learning tools throughout the duration of an assignment is scarce. Knowledge about how students use online tools before a course’s end could positively impact students’ learning outcomes. We introduce PEDI (Piazza Explorer Dashboard for Intervention), a tool which analyzes and presents visualizations of forum activity on Piazza, a question and answer forum, to instructors. We outline the design principles and data-informed recommendations used to design PEDI. Our prior research revealed two critical periods in students’ forum engagement over the duration of an assignment. Early engagement in the first half of an assignment duration positively correlates with class average performance. Whereas, extremely high engagement toward the deadline predicted lower class average performance. PEDI uses these findings to detect and flag troubling engagement levels and informs instructors through clear visualizations to promote data-informed interventions. By providing insights to instructors, PEDI may improve class performance and pave the way for a new generation of online tools.