In this short paper, we describe the design of a new web editor for beginners called openHTML and our initial evaluation with children aged 10 and 11 in an after-school web-building workshop. Drawing on data from verbally administered surveys and participant observation, we identified three kinds of engagement with the workshop tasks: a homework orientation, an artistic orientation, and a social orientation. We describe the kinds of scaffolding that the children needed to complete their web pages, the places where they struggled, and translate these observations into implications for the design of a web editor for children.

As part of a larger research agenda to explore web development as a context for learning computational literacy skills, we investigate errors people make while writing code in HTML and CSS. We report on a lab-based study in which 20 participants were video recorded as they completed coding tasks. We have applied the skills-rules-knowledge framework to segment this data by the cognitive causes of errors they made, and present a taxonomy of these errors. Our findings demonstrate how the skills-rules-framework can be used to analyze coding errors, provide insight about the origins of these errors, and suggest ways that the design of web development tools can be improved to support learning and practice with HTML and CSS.

Despite decades of research into how professional programmers debug, only recently has work emerged about how end-user programmers attempt to debug programs. Without this knowledge, we cannot build tools to adequately support their needs. This article reports the results of a detailed qualitative empirical study of end-user programmers' sensemaking about a spreadsheet's correctness. Using our study's data, we derived a sensemaking model for end-user debugging and categorized participants' activities and verbalizations according to this model, allowing us to investigate how participants went about debugging. Among the results are identification of the prevalence of information foraging during end-user debugging, two successful strategies for traversing the sensemaking model, potential ties to gender differences in the literature, sensemaking sequences leading to debugging progress, and sequences tied with troublesome points in the debugging process. The results also reveal new implications for the design of spreadsheet tools to support end-user programmers' sensemaking during debugging.

Web development can provide a rich context for exploring computer science concepts and practicing computational creativity. However, little is known about the experiences that people have when first learning web development. In this paper, we investigate the help-seeking activity of forty-nine students in an introductory web development course. By applying content analysis to the help forums of the course, we characterize the challenges they encountered and sought help for, relating them to development, instruction, technology, content, and design issues. We apply a second level of content analysis to the development issues, identifying aspects of learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that challenged students most often. Finally, we identify several computational concepts that relate to these challenges, including notation, hierarchies and paths, nesting, parameters and arguments, and decomposition and abstraction. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our findings for computing education.

Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools, such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic, we believe that closer examination of this premise is warranted. Therefore, in this paper, we report an end-to-end investigation into gender differences with spreadsheet software. Our results showed gender differences in feature usage, feature-related confidence, and tinkering (playful exploration) with features. Then, drawing implications from these results, we designed and implemented features for our spreadsheet prototype that took the gender differences into account. The results of an evaluation on this prototype showed improvements for both males and females, and also decreased gender differences in some outcome measures, such as confidence. These results are encouraging, but also open new questions for investigation. We also discuss how our results compare to generalization studies performed with a variety of other software platforms and populations.

Programming has recently become more common among ordinary end users of computer systems. We believe that these end-user programmers are not just coders but also designers, in that they interlace making design decisions with coding rather than treating them as two separate phases. To better understand and provide support for the programming and design needs of end users, we propose a design theory-based approach to look at end-user programming. Toward this end, we conducted a think-aloud study with ten end users creating a web mashup. By analyzing users' verbal and behavioral data using Schon's reflection-in-action design model and the notion of ideations from creativity literature, we discovered insights into end-user programmers' problem-solving attempts, successes, and obstacles, with accompanying implications for the design of end-user programming environments for mashups. The contribution of our work is three-fold: 1) the methodology of using a design lens to view programming, 2) evidence, through insights gained, of the usefulness of this approach, and 3) the implications themselves.

In recent years, systems have emerged that enable end users to “mash” together existing web services to build new web sites. However, little is known about how well end users succeed at building such mashups, or what they do if they do not succeed at their first attempt. To help fill this gap, we took a fresh look, from a debugging perspective, at the approaches of end users as they attempted to create mashups. Our results reveal the end users' debugging strategies and strategy barriers, the gender differences between the debugging strategies males and females followed and the features they used, and finally how their debugging successes and difficulties interacted with their design behaviors.

While prior research has investigated the practices of experienced web developers, little is known about the initial coding episodes of novices who are on the cusp of web development. Through interviews with library and information science students who have completed a web development course, we explore coding challenges that novices face and the emergence of strategies in response to them. Our results reveal that challenges arise from abstractions present in web development and their mismatch with WYSIWYG interfaces. These findings suggest new avenues for the design of web development tools that support the transitioning of non-coders into active web developers.

Empirical studies of end-user debugging have revealed that males outperform females. An explanation of this phenomenon is that males have higher perceived self-efficacy (or confidence) than females in their ability to debug. However, it is not clear whether self-efficacy is the primary or sole user self-perception that affects males' and females' performance. In this study, we investigate additional factors that may predict performance, including perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and intensity of flow. A hierarchical regression including both genders was used to analyze the relationships of the users' self-perceptions on performance outcomes. The results show that self-efficacy, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness are most predictive of performance. Surprisingly, females' self-perceptions did not predict performance.

Little is known about the strategies end-user programmers use in debugging their programs, and even less is known about gender differences that may exist in these strategies. Without this type of information, designers of end-user programming systems cannot know the "target" at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers. We present a study investigating this issue. We asked end-user programmers to debug spreadsheets and to describe their debugging strategies. Using mixed methods, we analyzed their strategies and looked for relationships among participants' strategy choices, gender, and debugging success. Our results indicate that males and females debug in quite different ways, that opportunities for improving support for end-user debugging strategies for both genders are abundant, and that tools currently available to end-user debuggers may be especially deficient in supporting debugging strategies used by females.

Recent research has begun to report that female end-user programmers are often more reluctant than males to employ features that are useful for testing and debugging. These earlier findings suggest that, unless such features can be changed in some appropriate way, there are likely to be important gender differences in end-user programmerspsila benefits from these features. In this paper, we compare end-user programmerspsila feature usage in an environment that supports end-user debugging, against an extension of the same environment with two features designed to help ameliorate the effects of low self-efficacy. Our results show ways in which these features affect female versus male enduser programmerspsila self-efficacy, attitudes, usage of testing and debugging features, and performance.

The sixth annual graduate consortium at VL/HCC addresses the question: How can researchers and designers of end-user development environments support computational problem-solving and information manipulation by diverse user populations?

Multiple factors combine to affect end users' success in learning to program. The goal of this research is to empirically investigate several factors that may predict learning to program in an introductory programming course for end users. The findings showed that software self-efficacy, programming self-efficacy, and computer playfulness were not direct predictors of successful programming; however, together they influenced computer interest, which in turn affected performance. The contribution of this paper is a model of the joint effects of a set of factors for end-user success in learning to program in a formal course setting.

When users input their passwords in a public place, they may be at risk of attackers stealing their password. An attacker can capture a password by direct observation or by recording the individual's authentication session. This is referred to as shoulder-surfing and is a known risk, of special concern when authenticating in public places. Until recently, the only defense against shoulder-surfing has been vigilance on the part of the user. This paper reports on the design and evaluation of a game-like graphical method of authentication that is resistant to shoulder-surfing. The Convex Hull Click (CHC) scheme allows a user to prove knowledge of the graphical password safely in an insecure location because users never have to click directly on their password images. Usability testing of the CHC scheme showed that novice users were able to enter their graphical password accurately and to remember it over time. However, the protection against shoulder-surfing comes at the price of longer time to carry out the authentication.

Earlier research on gender effects with software features intended to help problem-solvers in end-user debugging environments has shown that females are less likely to use unfamiliar software features. This poses a serious problem because these features may be key to helping them with debugging problems. Contrasting this with research documenting males' inclination for tinkering in unfamiliar environments, the question arises as to whether encouraging tinkering with new features would help females overcome the factors, such as low self-efficacy, that led to the earlier results. In this paper, we present an experiment with males and females in an end-user debugging setting, and investigate how tinkering behavior impacts several measures of their debugging success. Our results show that the factors of tinkering, reflection, and self-efficacy, can combine in multiple ways to impact debugging effectiveness differently for males than for females.

The problem of dependability in end-user programming is an emerging area of interest. Pair collaboration in end-user software development may offer a way for end users to debug their programs more effectively. While pair programming studies - primarily of computer science students and professionals - report positive outcomes in terms of overall program quality, little is known about specific activities that pairs engage in that lead to those outcomes, or of how the previous results may pertain to end-user programmers. In this paper we analyze protocols of end-user pairs debugging spreadsheets. The results suggest that end-user pairs can achieve rich reasoning, effective planning, and systematic evaluation. Furthermore, end-user pairs provide specific types of mutual support that facilitate the accomplishment of their goals

Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals-but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in self-efficacy and feature acceptance, with females exhibiting lower self-efficacy and lower feature acceptance. The results also show that these differences can significantly reduce females' effectiveness.

The introductory programming course is difficult for many university students, especially students who have little prior exposure to programming. Many factors affecting student success have been identified, but there is still a dearth of knowledge about how key factors combine to affect course outcomes. In this study we develop and empirically test a model integrating three factors of importance in learning to program: previous programming experience, perceived self-efficacy, and knowledge organization. The participants were non-majors. The findings showed that perceived self-efficacy increased significantly during a semester course. Previous experience affected perceived self-efficacy but not knowledge organization. Both perceived self-efficacy and knowledge organization had an effect on the course grade, as well as on success in a specific programming task, debugging. The results on self-efficacy also suggested that the participants were overconfident about their programming capabilities. The contribution of this paper is the identification of the joint effects of an important set of factors for programming success by non-majors.

Graphical passwords are an alternative to alphanumeric passwords in which users click on images to authenticate themselves rather than type alphanumeric strings. We have developed one such system, called PassPoints, and evaluated it with human users. The results of the evaluation were promising with respect to rmemorability of the graphical password. In this study we expand our human factors testing by studying two issues: the effect of tolerance, or margin of error, in clicking on the password points and the effect of the image used in the password system. In our tolerance study, results show that accurate memory for the password is strongly reduced when using a small tolerance (10 x 10 pixels) around the user's password points. This may occur because users fail to encode the password points in memory in the precise manner that is necessary to remember the password over a lapse of time. In our image study we compared user performance on four everyday images. The results indicate that there were few significant differences in performance of the images. This preliminary result suggests that many images may support memorability in graphical password systems.

Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females' willingness to adopt software features in end users' programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users' productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable to females. In this paper, we draw from our ongoing work with users to help inform our design of theory-based methods for encouraging effective feature usage by both genders. This design effort is the first to begin addressing the gender differences in the ways that people go about problem solving in end-user programming situations.

This paper describes the perceptions and attitudes of teachers who are end-user developers. A semi-structured interview of 22 teachers was carried out. It revealed motivational, situational, knowledge, and tool factors that affect their programming efforts. Five of the survey participants also carried out several program maintenance tasks in order to identify additional challenges in performing end-user programming tasks. The contribution of the study is an understanding of the facilitators and inhibitors of end-user development in a particular professional setting.

Learning to program is a unique experience for each student, and it is not fully understood why one person in an introductory programming course learns to program better and more quickly than the next. Self-efficacy is an individual's judgment of his or her ability to perform a task within a specific domain [1]. A mental model is a person's internal (mental) representation of real world objects and systems [9]. Research has shown that high self-efficacy and a good mental model are important to knowledge acquisition and transfer. This research investigates the effects of students' self-efficacy and mental models of programming on learning to program. The results show that self-efficacy for programming is influenced by previous programming experience and increases as a student progresses through an introductory programming course. The results also show that the student's mental model of programming influences self-efficacy and that both the mental model and self-efficacy affect course performance.

Teachers may engage in end-user programming to support student learning or administrative activities associated with teaching. The objective of this research is to understand strategies used by teachers in program comprehension and to identify specific problems they face. A think-aloud study was conducted of teachers comprehending an event-driven application, consisting of a graphical user interface and the scripts controlling it. We found that end users followed a strongly top-down strategy and breadth-wise exploration of the application. Depth-wise exploration was observed in half the teachers. Teachers varied greatly in their motivations and persistence to dig deeply into the code. Problems of the teachers included difficulties comprehending the event-driven application, given the distributed nature of the code, choosing appropriate inputs for running the program, and reasoning about the results of their test runs.

This study examines how certain software interfaces and prior exposure to other interfaces lead to effective learning. In particular, it studies the roles of the interaction style and the learner's prior exposure to other interaction styles mediated by the engagement of the learning environment, users' perceptions of the usefulness of the software, and users' perceptions of their ability to use the software successfully. In the experimental paradigm, two groups that learned a menu-driven or command-driven word processors after prior exposureto the assimilative context of a direct manipulation interaction style were compared to groups that learned those same interaction styles with no prior exposure to the assimilative context of the direct manipulation style software. The results confirm the importance of directness in the interaction style and of a prior assimilative context for learning. However, they also indicate that engagement has a strong effect on performance via its effect on perceived ease of use (PEU). This suggests that software designers should not only give special attention to creating software that promotes interface directness, but that also promotes engagement. Our results also suggest that it may be difficult to create engaging learning environments for learners who do not possess a relevant assimilative context to support software learning.

This research compared the learning of an application program whose interface was implemented using buttons with text labels, icons, or a fully redundant combination of icons and text labels. The objective was to: 1) evaluate the success of novice computer users in initially learning to use the application and in later use in a delayed session and 2) measure users' attitudes toward the application. Each session was divided into four blocks, and performance in the blocks was measured in terms of correctness of the tasks performed, time to perform tasks, and number of times the help facility was accessed. In addition, at the end of each session the participants' perceptions of the ease of use and usefulness of the software were measured. The results showed that in the first session performance was best on the label-only and icon-label interfaces. Performance on the icon-only interface was much poorer in session 1, particularly in terms of time and help references, but improved in session 2 to the point where it approached the performance on the other interfaces. Retention of skill between the initial and the delayed session was worse for the icon-only interface, but the effect was short-lived. Perceptions of ease of use were consistently better for the icon-label interface than for the other two interfaces. Perceptions of usefulness were higher for the icon-only and icon-label interfaces than for the label-only interface in the first session. Perceptions of usefulness became more positive for the icon-only group in the delayed session, but did not change for the other groups.

This paper reports on two experiments comparing mental representations and program comprehension by novices in the object-oriented and procedural styles. The subjects were novice programmers enrolled in a second course in programming which taught either the object-oriented or the procedural paradigm. The first experiment compared the mental representations and comprehension of short programs written in the procedural and object-oriented styles. The second experiment extended the study to a larger program incorporating more advanced language features. For the short programs there was no significant difference between the two groups with respect to the total number of questions answered correctly, but the object-oriented subjects were superior to the procedural subjects at answering questions about program function. This suggests that function information was more readily available in their mental representations of the programs and supports an argument that the object-oriented notation highlights function at the level of the individual class. For the long program a corresponding effect was not found. The comprehension of procedural subjects was superior to object-oriented subjects on all types of question. The difficulties experienced by the object-oriented subjects in answering questions in a larger program suggest that they faced problems in marshaling information and drawing inferences from it. We suggest that this result may be related to a longer learning curve for novices of the object-oriented style, as well as to features of the OO style and the particular OO language notation.

Journal Article The effect of interaction style and training method on end user learning of software packages Get access Sid Davis, Sid Davis * aDepartment of Decision Sciences, School of Business Administration, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA *Corresponding author Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Susan Wiedenbeck Susan Wiedenbeck bFaculty of Computer Science, Dalhouse University, Halifax, NS Canada B3J 2X4 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 11, Issue 2, 15 December 1998, Pages 147–172, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(98)00026-5 Published: 15 December 1998 Article history Received: 08 January 1997 Revision received: 16 August 1997 Accepted: 18 February 1998 Published: 15 December 1998

This research addresses two issues in the domain of computer training (1) whether learners are able to use exploration-based practice methods effectively to learn to use software and (2) whether some minimal computing background is necessary to be successful with minimalist training and exploration practice. An empirical study was carried out to compare exploration, exercises, and a combined format consisting of an exercise followed by exploration. Subjects of both high and low computer experience were included in the study. It was thought that the combined format might lead to superior training outcomes because it would both structure learning through an exercise and allow learners to go beyond the simple procedures in the training manual through exploration. The results showed that the performance of the low-experience subjects at test did not differ based on the type of practice. However, high-experience subjects who were trained using exercises or the combined format did significantly better than those trained using exploration alone. The similarity of performance of subjects in the exercise and combined practice conditions suggests that the exercise component of the practice explains their success.

An empirical study was carried out comparing three kinds of hands-on practice in training users of a software package; exercises, guided-exploration, and a combination of exercises and guided-exploration.Moderate to high experience computer users were trained.Subjects who were trained with exercises or the combined approach did significantly better in both time and errors than those trained using guidedexploration.There were no significant differences between the exercise and the combined approach groups.Thus, it appears that the better performance of these groups can be attributed to the exercise component of their practice.

The paper begins by describing a model of the influences operating when an experienced programmer learns to program in an unfamiliar language. It then reports on an empirical study which investigated how a change of programming language affects experienced programmers. Programmers solved a familiar problem using two unfamiliar languages. It was found that programmers used knowledge from past experience in solving the problem, but often had to adapt the knowledge to take good advantages of the new languages. They were only partly successful in doing this, and overall performance was poor. The solution process of the programmers was disrupted, as shown by more plan changes and more extensive backward planning. The two unfamiliar languages had impacts at different levels in the planning process.

Comprehension of computer programs involves identifying important program parts and inferring relationships between them. The ability to comprehend a computer program is a skill that begins its development in the novice programmer and reaches maturity in the expert programmer. This research examined the beginning of this process, that of comprehension of computer programs by novice programmers. The mental representations of the program text that novices form, which indicate the comprehension strategies being used, were examined. In the first study, 80 novice programmers were tested on their comprehension of short program segments. The results suggested that novices form detailed, concrete mental representations of the program text, supporting work that has previously been done with novice comprehension. Their mental representations were primarily procedural in nature, with little or no modeling using real‐world referents. In a second study, the upper and lower quartile comprehenders from Study 1 were tested on their comprehension of a longer program. Results supported the conclusions from Study 1 in that the novices tended towards detailed representations of the program text with little real‐world reference. However, the comprehension strategies used by high comprehenders differed substantially from those used by low comprehenders. Results indicated that the more advanced novices were using more abstract concepts in their representations, although their abstractions were detailed in nature.

There exists a large and growing population of noncomputer professionals utilizing wordprocessing software on personal computers. Noncomputer professional users of word processing technology are sometimes referred to as intermittent users. The purpose of this research was to understand the word processing characteristics and needs of this important group of users. We developed a model that describes their word processing performance and carried out two controlled experiments. We found that intermittent users behave like experts when executing a very small set of routine tasks but tend to be quite novice-like in most other tasks. Their editing behavior can be described as nonoptimal and relatively stable. Help systems and interface design are important factors of word processing technology that improve the performance of intermittent users. Our study indicates that intermittent users prefer and perform better with a menu-driven interface. In addition, we found that even a rudimentary help system can be a great aid to the intermittent user. © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Learning second and subsequent programming languages is easier than learning a first programming language because many concepts and constructs are shared. However, it is still a hard task. In this protocol analysis of moderately experienced programmers transferring to a new programming language, we classified episodes by whether they involved the syntactic, semantic, or planning level of programming knowledge. We discovered that most episodes involve planning and that in solving a given subproblem there are typically many cycles of language‐independent tactical planning followed by language‐dependent implementation planning. On the other hand, programmers have relatively minor problems with the syntax and semantics of a new language. Our subjects’ protocols and their final programs revealed that the plans they develop are strongly influenced by their knowledge of what would be convenient and appropriate in other languages they know. This prevents them from taking full advantage of the capabilities of the new language.

Two experiments on learning recursion and iteration were carried out. The first studied learning of the mathematical concept of recursion by having subjects compute mathematical functions by analogy to worked out examples. The results suggest that subjects are quite able to induce a computational procedure for both iterative and recursive functions from examples. Furthermore, prior practice with iterative examples does not seem to facilitate subsequent performance on similar recursive problems, nor does prior practice with recursive examples facilitate performance on iterative problems. The second experiment studied novice subjects' comprehension of iterative and recursive Pascal programs. Comprehension of the iterative program was not improved by prior exposure to the recursive version of the program. Comprehension of the recursive version was improved moderately by prior work with the iterative version.

This article reports on an experiment on the organization and use of programming knowledge. Novice and expert programmers made timed decisions about the structure and function of short and familiar FORTRAN code segments, similar to those in introductory programming textbooks. It was found that experts were faster and more accurate than novices, in spite of the simplicity of the materials. Functional decisions, which require analysis of the code, were slower than syntactic decisions for both groups, but were significantly slower for novices than for experts. This result suggests that the ability to extract and use functional information is characteristic of expertise in programming. Novices are less adept at using functional information, even when dealing with very small, simple programs appropriate to their own level of experience. The results of this study suggest that the difference between novice and expert programmers lies in the quality as well as the quantity of their knowledge. © 1986 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.