Programming environments intentionally designed to support novices have become increasingly popular, and growing research supports their efficacy. While these environments offer features to engage students and reduce the burden of syntax errors, they currently offer little support to students who get stuck and need expert assistance. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are computer systems designed to play this role, helping and guiding students to achieve better learning outcomes. We present iSnap, an extension to the Snap programming environment which adds some key features of ITSs, including detailed logging and automatically generated hints. We share results from a pilot study of iSnap, indicating that students are generally willing to use hints and that hints can create positive outcomes. We also highlight some key challenges encountered in the pilot study and discuss their implications for future work.
Frame-based editing is a novel way to edit programs, which claims to combine the benefits of textual and block-based programming. It combines structured 'frames' of preformatted code, designed to reduce the burden of syntax, with 'slots' that allow for efficient textual entry of expressions. We present an empirical evaluation of Stride, a frame-based language used in the Greenfoot IDE. We compare two groups of middle school students who worked on a short programming activity in Greenfoot, one using the original Java editor, and one using the Stride editor. We found that the two groups reported similarly low levels of frustration and high levels of satisfaction, but students using Stride progressed through the activity more quickly and completed more objectives. The Stride group also spent significantly less time making purely syntactic edits to their code and significantly less time with non-compilable code.
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