Can Direct Manipulation Lower the Barriers to Programming and Promote Positive Transfer to Textual Programming? An Experimental Study

Hundhausen, Christopher D.; Farley, Sean; Brown, Jonathan

doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2006.12

Cited by 43 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…While several previous empirical studies have demonstrated the value of novice programming and visualization environments in promoting both positive learning outcomes (e.g., [11,15]) and increased retention (e.g., [15,19]), little research has focused on explicating the particulars of innovative pedagogical approaches that amplify the benefits of such programming and visualization environments.…”

Section: Related and Background Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring studio-based instructional models for computing education

2008

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While the demand for college graduates with computing skills continues to rise, such skills no longer equate to mere programming skills. Modern day computing jobs demand design, communication, and collaborative work skills as well. Since traditional instructional methods in computing education tend to focus on programming skills, we believe that a fundamental rethinking of computing education is in order. We are exploring a new "studio-based" pedagogy that actively engages undergraduate students in collaborative, design-oriented learning. Adapted from architectural education, the studio-based instructional model emphasizes learning activities in which students (a) construct personalized solutions to assigned computing problems, and (b) present solutions to their instructors and peers for feedback and discussion within the context of "design crits." We describe and motivate the studio-based approach, review previous efforts to apply it to computer science education, and propose an agenda for multi-institutional research into the design and impact of studio-based instructional models. We invite educators to participate in a community of research and practice to advance studio-based learning in computing education.

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Section: Related and Background Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring studio-based instructional models for computing education

2008

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“…Tais interfaces diminuem as barreiras à programação textual [34]. A utilização dos recursos gráficos e mecanismos de arrastar e soltar presentes nestes ambientes é, portanto, a 1ª escolha na definição de um ambiente de programação para iniciantes centrada no hardware Arduino.…”

Section: Requisitos Do Sistemaunclassified

DuinoBlocks: Desenho e Implementação de um Ambiente de Programação Visual para Robótica Educacional

Alves¹,

Sampaio²,

Elia³

2015

RBIE

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“…The Conversational Programming Agent (CPA) will proactively execute parts of the program as created by the programmer and annotate the program discretely in order to help the end-user recognize potential differences between the intended program and the actual program. A simple feedback approach based on subtle colors is employed to avoid issues of cognitive overload recognized by Hundshausen, with the Alvis system [7]. He suggested that cognitive overload might be a limiting factor that should be considered when designing programming feedback systems.…”

Section: Prebugging: Proactive Debuggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making programming more conversational

Repenning

2011

2011 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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-Accelerated by the Do-It-Yourself mindset of the Web 2.0 culture, end-user programming-programming by end users with limited or even no formal programming background-is growing rapidly. Especially in educational settings, children are exposed to computational thinking by making games, building scientific simulations and creating stories. Early educational programming languages such as Logo have made programming substantially more accessible to end-users. More recent approaches include visual programming with a drag-and-drop style of programming that makes it nearly impossible to compose syntactically incorrect programs. However, as the syntactic challenges of end-user programming are gradually fading into the past, the new frontier of semantic programming support emerges. This demonstration introduces Conversational Programming, a system to make programming more conversational. A conversational programming agent runs programs one step into the future in order to help end-users visualize discrepancies between the programs they intended to write and their actual programming results.Keywords -Game design; computational thinking; debugging; end-user programming; visual programming. I. TOWARDS CONVERSATIONAL PROGRAMMINGIn programming, the interaction between the programmer and the programming environment is typically asymmetrical and often limited to syntactic feedback regarding programs that are malformed. Miss one semicolon in a C program and the program may no longer work at all. A programmer may spend a considerable amount of effort on writing a program before the programming environment provides meaningful feedback.One way to simplify programming would be to make the communication process between the programmer and the programming environment more symmetrical with the goal of aiding debugging. But just how can one conceptualize debugging? Pea [1] describes the process of debugging as: systematic efforts to eliminate discrepancies between the intended outcomes of a program and those brought through the current version of the program.A number of programming approaches, including programming by example [2, 3] and natural programming [4], try to systematically reduce these discrepancies by having programmers demonstrate actions on concrete examples or by providing programming languages that more closely resemble the way users with no programming background tend to think about certain problems. The notion of conversational programming, introduced in this paper, provides a different approach that employs computational agents to provide real-time semantic feedback to a programmer so that the programmer can identify discrepancies between the intended program and the actual program. The only way to provide this kind of semantic feedback is for the computer to actually execute parts of the program as written by the user. While this translates into additional computational needs for programming environments, we find that modern multi core computers have no problem handling this extra effort. More importantly, com...

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Can Direct Manipulation Lower the Barriers to Programming and Promote Positive Transfer to Textual Programming? An Experimental Study

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 43 publications

References 18 publications

Exploring studio-based instructional models for computing education

Exploring studio-based instructional models for computing education

DuinoBlocks: Desenho e Implementação de um Ambiente de Programação Visual para Robótica Educacional

Making programming more conversational

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