AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF William Jernigan for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science presented on October 26, 2015. Title: Generalizing the Idea Garden: Principles and Contexts

approved: ______________________________________________________ Margaret M. Burnett In previous work, the Idea Garden was created to help those relatively new to programming overcome their barriers in CoScripter. The goal of this thesis was to generalize the Idea Garden’s success to other users and environments. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this learn just a little when they need to overcome a barrier. We then instantiate the principles in a prototype and empirically investigate the principles in two studies: a formative think-aloud study and a pair of summer camps attended by 42 teens. Among the surprising results were the complementary roles of implicitly actionable hints versus explicitly actionable hints, and the importance of both context-free and context-sensitive availability. Under these principles, the camp participants required significantly less in-person help than in a previous camp to learn the same amount of material in the same amount of time. Furthermore, a third study including another pair of summer camps with 48 teens revealed that problem solving instruction coupled with Idea Garden helped the experimental condition advance to debugging more often and depend on helpers less than the control group. ©Copyright by William Jernigan October 26, 2015 All Rights Reserved Generalizing the Idea Garden: Principles and Contexts