Search Results

Documentation enables sharing knowledge between the developers of a technology and its users. Creating quality documents, however, is challenging: Documents must satisfy the needs of a large audience without being overwhelming for individuals. We address ...

Worked examples are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. However, instructors rarely have time to provide line-by-line explanations for a large number of examples typically used in a programming class. In this paper, ...

Background and Context: Open-ended programming projects encourage novice students to choose and pursue projects based on their own ideas and interests, and are widely used in many introductory programming courses. However, novice programmers encounter ...

Many students rely on examples when learning to program, but they often face barriers when incorporating these examples into their own code and learning the concepts they present. As a step towards designing effective example interfaces that can support ...

Documentation facilitates the transfer of knowledge among programmers and helps them become familiar with new technologies. However, the effectiveness with which a reader can find information in a document depends on its presentation format. In a prior ...

Code examples are of great value to programmers trying to learn an unfamiliar API. Effective code examples are often surrounded with plain text explanations of the relevant concepts, techniques, and API elements involved in the example. However, ...

Open-ended programming engages students by connecting computing with their real-world experience and personal interest. However, such open-ended programming tasks can be challenging, as they require students to implement features that they may be ...

Open-ended programming increases students' motivation by allowing them to solve authentic problems and connect programming to their own interests. However, such open-ended projects are also challenging, as they often encourage students to explore new ...

Code snippets available on question answering sites (e.g., Stack Overflow) are a great source of information for learning how to use APIs. However, it is difficult to determine which APIs are discussed in those code snippets because they often suffer ...

Many programmers want to use deep learning due to its superior accuracy in many challenging domains. Yet our formative study with ten programmers indicated that, when constructing their own deep neural networks (DNNs), they often had a difficult time ...

Independent novice programmers in open-ended contexts rely on help systems to support their learning. These help systems are often laboriously hand-authored by experts. This paper describes a semi-automatic process for the creation of a suggestion-based ...

Using existing APIs properly is a key challenge in programming, given that libraries and APIs are increasing in number and complexity. Programmers often search for online code examples in Q&A forums and read tutorials and blog posts to learn how to use a ...

Past work in the area of adaptive navigation support assumed no difference between different interface implementations of personalization approaches that are conceptually the same. The goal of this paper was to compare the impact of different ...

Code examples are commonly used learning resources that help students grasp various programming structures and concepts. However, example code usually requires explanations about what each line or part of the code does. Otherwise, students may find it ...

Software reuse is one of the major goals in software engineering. Frameworks promote the reuse of not only individual building blocks, but also of system design. However, framework instantiation requires a substantial understanding effort. High quality ...

Understanding how to properly use APIs of large libraries is difficult, error prone, and time consuming. Software developers resort to study to learn APIs. Several approaches have been proposed to mine these examples, but the sources from which they ...

Most software projects reuse components exposed through APIs, which provide developers access to implemented functionality. APIs have grown large and diverse, which raises questions regarding their usability. This article reports on a study of the ...

Programmers commonly reuse existing frameworks or libraries to reduce software development efforts. One common problem in reusing the existing frameworks or libraries is that the programmers know what type of object that they need, but do not know how ...

Code Search Engines (CSE) can serve as powerful resources of open source code, as they can search in billions of lines of open source code available on the web. The strength of CSEs can be used for several tasks like searching relevant code samples, ...