More people are learning to code than ever, but most learning opportunities do not explicitly teach the problem solving skills necessary to succeed at open-ended programming problems. In this paper, we present a new approach to impart these skills, consisting of: 1) explicit instruction on programming problem solving, which frames coding as a process of translating mental representations of problems and solutions into source code, 2) a method of visualizing and monitoring progression through six problem solving stages, 3) explicit, on-demand prompts for learners to reflect on their strategies when seeking help from instructors, and 4) context-sensitive help embedded in a code editor that reinforces the problem solving instruction. We experimentally evaluated the effects of our intervention across two 2-week web development summer camps with 48 high school students, finding that the intervention increased productivity, independence, programming self-efficacy, metacognitive awareness, and growth mindset. We discuss the implications of these results on learning technologies and classroom instruction.
Personas often aim to improve product designers' ability to "see through the eyes of" target users through the empathy personas can inspire-but personas are also known to promote stereotyping. This tension can be particularly problematic when personas (who, of course as "people" have genders) are used to promote gender inclusiveness-because reinforcing stereotypical perceptions can run counter to gender inclusiveness. In this paper we explicitly investigate this tension through a new approach to personas: one that includes multiple photos (of males and females) for a single persona. We compared this approach to an identical persona with only one photo using a controlled laboratory study and an eyetracking study. Our goal was to answer the following question: is it possible for personas to encourage product designers to engage with personas while at the same avoiding promoting gender stereotyping? Our results are encouraging about the use of personas with multiple pictures as a way to expand participants' consideration of multiple genders without reducing their engagement with the persona.
Although exploring alternatives is fundamental to creating better interface designs, current processes for creating alternatives are generally manual, limiting the alternatives a designer can explore. We present Scout, a system that helps designers rapidly explore alternatives through mixed-initiative interaction with high-level constraints and design feedback. Prior constraint-based layout systems use low-level spatial constraints and generally produce a single design. To support designer exploration of alternatives, Scout introduces high-level constraints based on design concepts (e.g., semantic structure, emphasis, order) and formalizes them into low-level spatial constraints that a solver uses to generate potential layouts. In an evaluation with 18 interface designers, we found that Scout: (1) helps designers create more spatially diverse mobile interface layouts with similar quality to those created with a baseline tool and (2) can help designers avoid a linear design process and quickly ideate layouts they do not believe they would have thought of on their own.
By which 'critical' means an intellectual stance of skepticism, centering the consequences, limitations, and unjust impacts of computing in society.
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