Investigating the Impact of On-Demand Code Examples on Novices' Open-Ended Programming Experience
Wengran Wang, John Thomas Bacher, Amy Isvik, Ally Limke, Sandeep Sthapit, Yang Meng Lin Shi, Benyamin T. Tabarsi, Keith Tran, Veronica Cateté, Tiffany M. Barnes, Chris Martens, Thomas Price · 2023
Background and Context: Open-ended programming projects encourage novice students to choose and pursue projects based on their own ideas and interests, and are widely used in many introductory programming courses. However, novice programmers encounter challenges exploring and discovering new ideas, implementing their ideas, and applying unfamiliar programming concepts and APIs. Code examples are one of the primary resources students use to apply code usage patterns and learn API knowledge, but little work has investigated the effect of having access to examples on students’ open-ended programming experience.