  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 programming features and attempt tasks that they have
not learned before. Code examples are effective learning materials for students
and are well-suited to supporting open-ended programming. However, there is
little work to understand how novices learn with examples during open-ended
programming, and few real-world deployments of such tools. In this paper, we
explore novices' learning barriers when interacting with code examples during
open-ended programming. We deployed Example Helper, a tool that offers
galleries of code examples to search and use, with 44 novice students in an
introductory programming classroom, working on an open-ended project in Snap.
We found three high-level barriers that novices encountered when using
examples: decision, search and integration barriers. We discuss how these
barriers arise and design opportunities to address them.
