A Study of Editor Features in a Creative Coding Classroom

TL;DR

This paper investigates how editor features can be designed to better support creative coding education, analyzing student interactions and feedback to identify effective enhancements and design tensions.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental editor with novel features for creative coding education and evaluates their impact through longitudinal student studies.

Findings

Features like color pickers and bidirectional shape editing improve engagement.

Design tensions exist between tools that enhance creativity and those that support learning.

Student feedback highlights the need for balancing artistic freedom and educational clarity.

Abstract

Creative coding is a rapidly expanding domain for both artistic expression and computational education. Numerous libraries and IDEs support creative coding, however there has been little consideration of how the environments themselves might be designed to serve these twin goals. To investigate this gap, we implemented and used an experimental editor to teach a sequence of college and high-school creative coding courses. In the first year, we conducted a log analysis of student work (n=39) and surveys regarding prospective features (n=25). These guided our implementation of common enhancements (e.g. color pickers) as well as uncommon ones (e.g. bidirectional shape editing). In the second year, we studied the effects of these features through logging (n=39+) and survey (n=23) studies. Reflecting on the results, we identify opportunities to improve creativity- and novice-focused IDEs and highlight tensions in their design -- as in tools that augment artistry or efficiency but may be perceived as hindering learning.