End-users publishing structured information on the web: an observational study of what, why, and how

End-users are accustomed to filtering and browsing styled collections of data on professional web sites, but they have few ways to create and publish such information architectures for themselves. This paper presents a full-lifecycle analysis of the Exhibit framework - an end-user tool which provides such functionality - to understand the needs, capabilities, and practices of this class of users. We include interviews, as well as analysis of over 1,800 visualizations and 200,000 web interactions with these visualizations. Our analysis reveals important findings about this user population which generalize to the task of providing better end-user structured content publication tools.Intel Science & Technology Center for Big Dat

Novice programming environments: lowering the barriers, supporting the progression

In 2011, the author published an article that looked at the state of the art in novice programming environments. At the time, there had been an increase in the number of programming environments that were freely available for use by novice programmers, particularly children and young people. What was interesting was that they offered a relatively sophisticated set of development and support features within motivating and engaging environments, where programming could be seen as a means to a creative end, rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, these environments incorporated support for the social and collaborative aspects of learning. The article considered five environments—Scratch, Alice, Looking Glass, Greenfoot, and Flip— examining their characteristics and investigating the opportunities they might offer to educators and learners alike. It also considered the broader implications of such environments for both teaching and research. In this chapter, the author revisits the same five environments, looking at how they have changed in the intervening years. She considers their evolution in relation to changes in the field more broadly (e.g., an increased focus on “programming for all”) and reflects on the implications for teaching, as well as research and further development

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone

Generalizing the Idea Garden : Principles and Contexts

In previous work, the Idea Garden was created to help those relatively new to programming overcome their barriers in CoScripter. The goal of this thesis was to generalize the Idea Garden's success to other users and environments. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this learn just a little when they need to over-come a barrier. We then instantiate the principles in a prototype and empirically investigate the principles in two studies: a formative think-aloud study and a pair of summer camps attended by 42 teens. Among the surprising results were the complementary roles of implicitly actionable hints versus explicitly actionable hints, and the importance of both context-free and context-sensitive availability. Under these principles, the camp participants required significantly less in-person help than in a previous camp to learn the same amount of material in the same amount of time. Furthermore, a third study including another pair of summer camps with 48 teens revealed that problem solving instruction coupled with Idea Garden helped the experimental condition advance to debugging more often and depend on helpers less than the control group

Evaluating the Effects of Immersive Embodied Interaction on Cognition in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is on its advent of becoming mainstream household technology, as technologies such as head-mounted displays, trackers, and interaction devices are becoming affordable and easily available. Virtual reality (VR) has immense potential in enhancing the fields of education and training, and its power can be used to spark interest and enthusiasm among learners. It is, therefore, imperative to evaluate the risks and benefits that immersive virtual reality poses to the field of education. Research suggests that learning is an embodied process. Learning depends on grounded aspects of the body including action, perception, and interactions with the environment. This research aims to study if immersive embodiment through the means of virtual reality facilitates embodied cognition. A pedagogical VR solution which takes advantage of embodied cognition can lead to enhanced learning benefits. Towards achieving this goal, this research presents a linear continuum for immersive embodied interaction within virtual reality. This research evaluates the effects of three levels of immersive embodied interactions on cognitive thinking, presence, usability, and satisfaction among users in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Results from the presented experiments show that immersive virtual reality is greatly effective in knowledge acquisition and retention, and highly enhances user satisfaction, interest and enthusiasm. Users experience high levels of presence and are profoundly engaged in the learning activities within the immersive virtual environments. The studies presented in this research evaluate pedagogical VR software to train and motivate students in STEM education, and provide an empirical analysis comparing desktop VR (DVR), immersive VR (IVR), and immersive embodied VR (IEVR) conditions for learning. This research also proposes a fully immersive embodied interaction metaphor (IEIVR) for learning of computational concepts as a future direction, and presents the challenges faced in implementing the IEIVR metaphor due to extended periods of immersion. Results from the conducted studies help in formulating guidelines for virtual reality and education researchers working in STEM education and training, and for educators and curriculum developers seeking to improve student engagement in the STEM fields

A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

We describe a code reuse tool for use in the Looking Glass IDE, the successor to Storytelling Alice [17], which enables middle school students with little to no programming experience to reuse functionality they find in programs written by others. Users (1) record a feature to reuse, (2) find code responsible for the feature, (3) abstract the code into a reusable Actionscript by describing object “roles,” and (4) integrate the Actionscript into another program. An exploratory study with middle school students indicates they can successfully reuse code. Further, 36 of the 47 users appropriated new programming constructs through the process of reuse. Author Keywords Code reuse, non-programmer, end user, middle school

The Example Guru: Suggesting Examples to Novice Programmers in an Artifact-Based Context

Programmers in artifact-based contexts could likely benefit from skills that they do not realize exist. We define artifact-based contexts as contexts where programmers have a goal project, like an application or game, which they must figure out how to accomplish and can change along the way. Artifact-based contexts do not have quantifiable goal states, like the solution to a puzzle or the resolution of a bug in task-based contexts. Currently, programmers in artifact-based contexts have to seek out information, but may be unaware of useful information or choose not to seek out new skills. This is especially problematic for young novice programmers in blocks programming environments. Blocks programming environments often lack even minimal in-context support, such as auto-complete or in-context documentation. Novices programming independently in these blocks-based programming environments often plateau in the programming skills and API methods they use. This work aims to encourage novices in artifact-based programming contexts to explore new API methods and skills. One way to support novices may be with examples, as examples are effective for learning and highly available. In order to better understand how to use examples for supporting novice programmers, I first ran two studies exploring novices\u27 use and focus on example code. I used those results to design a system called the Example Guru. The Example Guru suggests example snippets to novice programmers that contain previously unused API methods or code concepts. Finally, I present an approach for semi-automatically generating content for this type of suggestion system. This approach reduces the amount of expert effort required to create suggestions. This work contains three contributions: 1) a better understanding of difficulties novices have using example code, 2) a system that encourages exploration and use of new programming skills, and 3) an approach for generating content for a suggestion system with less expert effort

'I liked it, but it made you think too much': A case study of computer game authoring in the Key Stage 3 ICT curriculum

The importance of giving pupils opportunities to become producers of digital media is well documented in the literature (see Harel, 1991; Papert, 1993; Kafai, 1995; Harel Caperton, 2010; Luckin et al., 2012; Nesta, 2012; Sefton-Green, 2013), however there has been little research in this area in the context of the UK Key Stage 3 ICT curriculum. The purpose of this study is to achieve an understanding of how authoring computer games in a mainstream secondary setting can support the learning of basic game design and programming concepts. The research explores pupils’ experiences of the process they followed and the areas of learning they encountered as they made their games, and considers what they valued and what they found difficult in the game authoring activity. The research draws on the learning theory of constructionism, which asserts the importance of pupils using computers as ‘building material’ to create digital artefacts. In the process of creating these artefacts, over time, computers become ‘objects to think with’, enabling pupils to learn how to learn (Papert, 1980b; Harel and Papert, 1991a). Data were collected in planning documents, journals and the games pupils made, in recordings of their working conversations, and in pair and group interviews. Findings indicate that as well as learning some basic programming concepts, pupils enjoyed the activity, demonstrated positive attitudes to learning and felt a sense of achievement in creating a complex artefact which had personal and cultural significance for them. This research acknowledges the need to develop accessible units of work to implement aspects of the new Computing curriculum (DfE, 2013c), especially for teachers and pupils who have little prior knowledge of the field. It suggests that computer game authoring may offer a viable entry and considers the extent to which constructionist approaches are suitable for this kind of work

Helping end-user programmers help themselves : the idea garden approach

End-user programmers face many barriers in programming. Research has seen many programming environments that attempted to lower or remove the barriers but despite these efforts, empirical studies continue to report barriers users face. To investigate this issue, we took a theory-informed approach. Using theories from design, creativity, and problem solving as a lens, we examined end-user programmers' programming obstacles to derive design implications. Synthesizing the implications, we proposed an Idea Garden approach for creating problem-solving support in existing end-user programming environments aimed at helping users help themselves. This approach focuses on delivering problem-solving strategies and programming knowledge in the context of users' work to help them overcome barriers. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype of an Idea Garden for the CoScripter environment. Results from empirical studies of the prototype were encouraging: not only was the Idea Garden able to help users overcome barriers, learn relevant programming and strategies, but such learning persisted with users so that they were able to apply it toward problem-solving new tasks without further help from the Idea Garden. We conclude by providing recommendations to researchers who are interested in developing an Idea Garden for their end-user programming environments