End-user programmers in trouble: Can the Idea Garden help them to help themselves?

Abstract

End-user programmers often get stuck because they do not know how to overcome their barriers. We have previously presented an approach called the Idea Garden, which makes minimalist, on-demand problem-solving support available to end-user programmers in trouble. Its goal is to encourage end users to help themselves learn how to overcome programming difficulties as they encounter them. In this paper, we investigate whether the Idea Garden approach helps end-user programmers problem-solve their programs on their own. We ran a statistical experiment with 123 end-user programmers. The experiment's results showed that, even when the Idea Garden was no longer available, participants with little knowledge of programming who previously used the Idea Garden were able to produce higher-quality programs than those who had not used the Idea Garden.