Young People's Descriptions of Computational Rules in Role-Playing Games: An Empirical Study

Good, Judith; Howland, Kate; Nicholson, Keiron

doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2010.18

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…An initial exploration, reported in full in [1], investigated whether young people could use natural language to write rules that correctly described behavior occurring in a computer game. Sixty four pupils aged 11-12 (35 female, 29 male) took part in the study.…”

Section: B Initial Explorations Of Natural Language For Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural language and programming: Designing effective environments for novices

Good

Howland

2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Abstract-Given the current drive to teach computational concepts to all from an early age, we consider whether traditional programming languages are truly necessary, or whether natural language might be a suitable medium for program generation and comprehension, given its familiarity and ubiquity. We conducted an empirical study on the use of natural language for computation, and found that, although it provides support for understanding computational concepts, it introduces additional difficulties when used for coding. Following a design study with target users, we distilled our findings into a series of design guidelines for novice programming environments that incorporate natural language. These guidelines drove the design of Flip, a bimodal programming language for young people's game creation activities. An empirical study examined the extent to which these embodied design guidelines support ease of use and an understanding of computation. The guidelines have potential both for analysing the usability of existing novice programming environments, and for designing new ones.

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Section: B Initial Explorations Of Natural Language For Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we firstly examine the viability of natural language based programming languages through an empirical study 1 . We then describe a design study that allowed us to synthesise our findings into a set of guidelines for the use of natural language in programming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural language and programming: Designing effective environments for novices

Good

Howland

2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Self Cite

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“…An event-based approximation makes it easier to understand the rules that determine behavior, as shown by the results of certain experimental studies in [34] [35]. Additionally, since behavior in AmI is also event-driven, the rules are considered the ideal mechanism for this purpose [36].…”

Section: Rule-based Behavior With Ecamimentioning

confidence: 99%

A meta-model for dataflow-based rules in smart environments: Evaluating user comprehension and performance

Catalá

Pons

Jaén

et al. 2013

Science of Computer Programming

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ElsevierCatalá Bolós, A.; Pons, P.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Mocholi Agües, JA.; Navarro Martínez, EM. (2013). A meta-model for dataflow-based rules in smart environments: Evaluating user comprehension and performance. Science of Computer Programming. 78(10):1930-1950. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2012.06.010. This is a preprint copy of the article "A meta-model for dataflow-based rules in smart environments: Evaluating user comprehension and performance". Please, use the link below to find the final published version and its complete reference. Albacete, Spain enavarro@dsi.uclm.es Abstract A considerable part of the behavior in smart environments relies on event-driven and rule specification. Rules are the mechanism most often used to enable user customization of the environment. However, the expressiveness of the rules available to users in editing and other tools is usually either limited or the available rule editing interfaces are not designed for end users with low skills in programming. This means we have to look for interaction techniques and new ways to define user customization rules. This paper describes a generic and flexible meta-model to support expressive rules enhanced with data flow expressions that will graphically support the definition of rules without writing code. An empirical study was conducted on the ease-of-understanding of the visual data flow expressions, which are the key elements in our rule proposal. The visual dataflow language was compared to its corresponding textual version in terms of comprehension and ease of learning by teenagers in exercises involving calculations, modifications, writing and detecting equivalences in expressions in both languages. Although the subjects had some previous experience in editing mathematical expressions on spreadsheets, the study found their performance with visual dataflows to be significantly better in calculation and modification exercises. This makes our dataflow approach a promising mechanism for expressing user-customized reactive behavior in AmI environments. The performance of the rule matching processor was validated by means of two stress tests to ensure that the meta-model approach adopted would be able to scale up with the number of types and instances in the space.

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“…2015 Due to their reactive nature, smart environments often rely on event-based solutions. Event-ConditionAction (ECA) rules are usually preferred for these specifications [27], [40], and several studies reveal that ECA rules are easily understood by users with no programming knowledge [17], [22], [32]. However, the existing ECA rule-based approaches for specifying behavior either tend to minimize the expressiveness of the language in order to make it understandable to users or restrict highly expressive language to professional developers or skilled users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Customizing smart environments: A tabletop approach

Pons

Catalá

Jaén

2015

AIS

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Abstract. Smart environments are becoming a reality in our society and the number of intelligent devices integrated in these spaces is increasing very rapidly. As the combination of intelligent elements will open a wide range of new opportunities to make our lives easier, final users should be provided with a simplified method of handling complex intelligent features. Specifying behavior in these environments can be difficult for non-experts, so that more efforts should be directed towards easing the customization tasks. This work presents an entirely visual rule editor based on dataflow expressions for interactive tabletops which allows behavior to be specified in smart environments. An experiment was carried out aimed at evaluating the usability of the editor in terms of non-programmers' understanding of the abstractions and concepts involved in the rule model, ease of use of the proposed visual interface and the suitability of the interaction mechanisms implemented in the editing tool. The study revealed that users with no previous programming experience were able to master the proposed rule model and editing tool for specifying behavior in the context of a smart home, even though some minor usability issues were detected.

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Young People's Descriptions of Computational Rules in Role-Playing Games: An Empirical Study

Cited by 14 publications

References 7 publications

Natural language and programming: Designing effective environments for novices

Natural language and programming: Designing effective environments for novices

A meta-model for dataflow-based rules in smart environments: Evaluating user comprehension and performance

Customizing smart environments: A tabletop approach

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