Tinkering in the Wild: What Leads to Success for Female End-User Programmers?

Abstract

Tinkering has been found to be beneficial to learning, yet women report being disinclined to tinker with software even though their tinkering can be more effective than men's. This paper reports on a real-world study of how female end-user programmers tinker with new and existing code and what makes their tinkering successful. Findings show that tinkering falls into two main categories: testing an educated guess (more successful) or haphazard trial and error (less successful). In addition, learners occasionally do not tinker to test a successful solution but rather wait to ask another for confirmation of their educated guess before proceeding. Conclusions from this work show that tinkering leads to success when participants are thinking critically about what the code is doing and have hypothesized expected results from code changes. These findings suggest that designers of end-user programmer instructional materials would assist learners by giving explicit tools and techniques that foster successful tinkering.