Open Collections

Kerr, Katharine

University of British Columbia

As programming becomes more ubiquitous, development environments must accommodate a more diverse set of users. Considering how to better support users of different ages and genders who program is an important first step for designing more inclusive development environments. Our research takes a step towards that goal as we evaluated how 91 end users (97% women) programmed in a live programming environment that we created and designed to support tinkering. The diverse ages of the participants, aged 19-29 to over 70, allowed us to identify trends in how differently-aged participants worked to complete their tasks. In addition to task performance, we analyzed the participants' thoughts and emotional responses towards the environment's features to learn what aspects of the environment they found insightful, confusing, and encouraged experimentation. We found that while older participants were less successful than younger participants, participants of all ages were more likely to succeed if they iterated more and decomposed tasks into partially correct programs. Additionally, users found the environment engaging and favoured visual feedback when making progress and when stuck. Our results provide insights into how development environments can be designed to more inclusively support a broader set of end user programmers.

Text

2023-08-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85643

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/