The idea garden: From a qualitative evaluation toward an quantitative evaluation and generalization

To help end-user programmers overcome barriers they encounter in programming, I have been investigating an approach called the Idea Garden, which aims to “help users to help themselves” in the context of their self-directed tasks. In this paper, I present an example Idea Garden feature hosted in the CoScripter environment, and the results from a qualitative evaluation of how the feature helped users overcome a barrier and learn the related programming knowledge as well as a problem-solving strategy. Then I outline the plan for a quantitative evaluation. Finally, I discuss the generalizability of the Idea Garden approach.