“Gardening” end-user programmers´ ideas

Despite recent advances in supporting end-user programmers, empirical studies continue to report barriers that end users experience in problem solving with programming environments. I hypothesize that an important barrier that still needs to be overcome is the lack of support for nurturing end-user programmers´ ideas about how a program should be written or about how to solve programming difficulties. To test this hypothesis, I conducted two qualitative empirical investigations, and triangulated their results with theories from problem-solving, creativity, and design, to explore design opportunities and a design space for idea gardening. Idea gardening is a concept for designing end-user programming environments with a focus on nurturing end-user programmers´ ideas to help them gradually gain expertise as they overcome barriers.