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

Abstract

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.