Programming by example: novice programming comes of age

Smith, David Canfield; Cypher, Allen; Tesler, Larry

doi:10.1145/330534.330544

Cited by 83 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…Play [48], My Make Believe Castle [34], Hands [42], ToonTalk [19], Klik & Play [33], Stagecast [47], Toque [49] and others all focus on enabling learners to create novel animations and games. Similar efforts have been made at the college level with projects such as Georgia Computes!…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such approaches include simplifying the textual programming language syntax [10,43], designing languages that mimic how children describe program behavior [42], preventing syntax errors entirely by designing program construction interfaces that use drag and drop interactions (e.g., [7,22,35]) or form filling [33,34,47] rather than text. Others have attempted to simplify the debugging of programs by enabling learners to select "why" questions about program output [28,30].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Personifying programming tool feedback improves novice programmers' learning

Lee

2011

Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computing Education Research

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Many novice programmers view programming tools as allknowing, infallible authorities about what is right and wrong about code. This misconception is particularly detrimental to beginners, who may view the cold, terse, and often judgmental errors from compilers as a sign of personal failure. It is possible, however, that attributing this failure to the computer, rather than the learner, may improve learners' motivation to program. To test this hypothesis, we present Gidget, a game where the eponymous robot protagonist is cast as a fallible character that blames itself for not being able to correctly write code to complete its missions. Players learn programming by working with Gidget to debug its problematic code. In a two-condition controlled experiment, we manipulated Gidget's level of personification in: communication style, sound effects, and image. We tested our game with 116 self-described novice programmers recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and found that, when given the option to quit at any time, those in the experimental condition (with a personable Gidget) completed significantly more levels in a similar amount of time. Participants in the control and experimental groups played the game for an average time of 39.4 minutes (SD=34.3) and 50.1 minutes (SD=42.6) respectively. These finding suggest that how programming tool feedback is portrayed to learners can have a significant impact on motivation to program and learning success.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personifying programming tool feedback improves novice programmers' learning

Lee

2011

Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Computing Education Research

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“…One of them would be to seamlessly integrating Pantagruel in the 2D editor, enabling rules to be created by directly selecting and connecting together the entities represented in the 2D model of the environment. Doing so could later lead to a programming-by-example development process [44]. This research direction could also leverage recent advances in end-user software engineering [45].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Taxonomy-driven prototyping of home automation applications: A novice-programmer visual language and its evaluation

Drey

Consel

2012

Journal of Visual Languages & Computing

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Home automation environments are dedicated to helping users in their everyday life and are being deployed in an increasing number of areas, including home security, energy consumption, and assisted living. The range of situations to be addressed makes the development of home automation applications challenging: it requires to manage heterogeneous entities with a wide variety of functionalities. Moreover, since this area covers a large spectrum of user needs, it is crucial to ease the development and the evolution of these applications. This paper presents Pantagruel, an expressive and accessible approach to integrating a taxonomical description of a home automation environment into a visual programming language. A taxonomy describes the relevant entities of a given home automation area and serves as a parameter to a sensor-controller-actuator development paradigm. The orchestration of area-specific entities is supported by high-level constructs, customized with respect to taxonomical information.We have implemented a visual environment that integrates a taxonomical approach in the development of orchestration rules. Furthermore, we have developed a compiler for Pantagruel and successfully used it to test applications in various areas related to orchestration development for the domain of home automation. Finally, we have successfully evaluated the usability of Pantagruel through a user study performed with eighteen novice programmers.

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“…Two well-known examples are AgentSheets [11] and StageCast creator [13]. In the AgentSheets approach, for instance, a program is given by a set of visual rewrite rules that map one graphic state, represented as a 2D tile, to the next.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A visual language for representing and explaining strategies in game theory

Erwig

Walkingshaw

2008

2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing

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We present a visual language for strategies in game theory, which has potential applications in economics, social sciences, and in general science education. This language facilitates explanations of strategies by visually representing the interaction of players' strategies with game execution. We have utilized the cognitive dimensions framework in the design phase and recognized the need for a new cognitive dimension of "traceability" that considers how well a language can represent the execution of a program. We consider how traceability interacts with other cognitive dimensions and demonstrate its use in analyzing existing languages. We conclude that the design of a visual representation for execution traces should be an integral part of the design of visual languages because understanding a program is often tightly coupled to its execution.

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Programming by example: novice programming comes of age

Cited by 83 publications

References 10 publications

Personifying programming tool feedback improves novice programmers' learning

Personifying programming tool feedback improves novice programmers' learning

Taxonomy-driven prototyping of home automation applications: A novice-programmer visual language and its evaluation

A visual language for representing and explaining strategies in game theory

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