Towards Understanding Successful Novice Example Use in Blocks-Based Programming
Michelle Ichinco, Kyle J. Harms, Caitlin L. Kelleher · Journal of Visual Languages and Sentient Systems · 2017
Blocks-based environments are frequently used in settings where there is little or no access to teachers.Effective support for examples in blocks-based environments may help novices learn in the absence of human experts.However, existing research suggests that novices can struggle to use examples effectively.We conducted a study exploring the impacts of example-task similarity and annotation style on children's abilities to use examples in a blocks-based environment.To gain understanding of where and why children struggle, we examined the degree to which (1) children were able to map a task to its corresponding example, and (2) their programming behavior predicted task success.The results suggest that annotations improve task performance to an extent and that mappings and programming behavior can begin to explain the remaining problems novices have using examples.