Age-Inclusive Integrated Development Environments for End-Users

Computation increasingly pervades modern life in both the professional and personal realms. An example in the personal realm is the maker movement, which has helped expose many end-users to programming. To ensure equitable access to these new programming domains, it is important to ensure that the tools being promoted to these communities can be used broadly. In this paper, we investigate a tinkering-focused integrated development environment for makers who are engaged specifically in customizing designs for hand knitting. Through a controlled experiment with 91 end-users, 32 of whom were over age 50, we identified trends in how differently-aged participants worked through their maker design tasks with our integrated development environment. While older participants found it more challenging to complete assigned design tasks, participants of all ages were more likely to succeed if they decomposed tasks into partially correct programs. However, we found that successful participants of all ages exhibited common traits of engagement, experimentation, and curiosity. Users found the environment engaging and favoured visual feedback both when making progress and when stuck. Our results provide insights into how development environments can be designed to more inclusively support a broader cross-section of end-users.