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 challenges exploring and discovering new ideas, implementing their ideas, and applying unfamiliar programming concepts and APIs. Code examples are one of the primary resources students use to apply code usage patterns and learn API knowledge, but little work has investigated the effect of having access to code examples on students’ open-ended programming experience. In this work, We evaluate the impact of code examples on open-ended programming, through a study with 46 local high school students in a full-day coding workshop. I conducted a controlled study, where half of the students had full access to 37 code examples using an example browser system called Example Helper, and the other half had 5 standard, tutorial examples. We found that students who had access to all 37 code examples used a significantly larger variety of code APIs, perceived the programming as relatively more creative, but also experienced a higher task load. We also found weak evidence of a better post-assignment performance from the Example Helper group, showing that some students were able to learn and apply the knowledge they learned from examples to a new programming task. My results show that having access to code examples during open-ended programming helped students become more creative, build projects with a larger variety of APIs, and learn new knowledge for future tasks.