An exploratory study of the usage of different educational resources in an independent context

There are a variety of learning resources with the potential to support children in learning programming independently. While many of them have been evaluated in laboratory settings, we know little about how children choose to use these resources on their own. We conducted a study organized around a film festival to explore children's open-ended use of four different learning supports: tutorials, code puzzles, in-application documentation and code suggestions. The study began with a workshop to introduce the programming environment and available tools, continued through two weeks of home use, and culminated in a film festival. Results suggest that participants leveraged in-context forms of help most frequently, but valued documentation for question-answering and suggestions for opportunistic learning.