Advanced Visual Systems Supporting Unwitting EUD

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use, thus users and developers are not anymore two mutually exclusive groups of people. In this paper types of users that are between pure end users and software developers are analyzed. Some users take a very active role in shaping software tools to their needs, but they do it without being aware of programming, they are unwitting programmers who need appropriate development techniques and environments. A meta-design participatory approach for supporting unwitting end-user development through advanced visual systems is briefly discussed

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

Virtual Assistants for End-User Development in the Internet of Things

The spread of Virtual Assistants (software and hardware) on the consumer market deeply changed the way Internet of Things (IoT) is implemented and used today. Such devices, and related applications, are becoming more and more integrated within smart environments and this might pave the way to potential new approaches to End-User Development activities, which can be performed in IoT environments. This paper discusses the evolution of the IoT ecosystem definition that has been studied by the authors in the last years

End-user empowerment in lifelogging activities

With the widespread of Internet of Things\u2019 devices, sensors, and applications, the quantity of collected data grows enormously and the need of extracting, merging, analyzing, visualizing, and sharing it paves the way for new research challenges. This ongoing revolution of how personal devices are used and how they are becoming more and more wearable has important influences on the most well established definitions of end user and end-user development. The paper presents an analysis of the most diffused applications that allow end users to aggregate quantified-self data, originated by several sensors and devices, and to use it in personalized ways. From the outcomes of the analysis, we present a new EUD paradigm and language that extends the ones existing in the current state of the art Internet of Things

Examining Student Coding Behaviours in Creative Computing Lessons using Abstract Syntax Trees and Vocabulary Analysis

Creative computing is an approach to computing education which emphasises the creation of interactive audiovisual software and an art-school influenced pedagogy. Given this emphasis on Dewey’s "learning by doing”, we set out to investigate the processes students use to develop their programs. We refer to these processes as the students’ ‘coding behaviour’, and we expect that understanding it will provide us with valuable information about how students learn in our creative computing classes. As existing metrics were not sufficient, we introduce a new set of quantitative metrics to describe coding behaviours. The metrics consider factors such as students’ vocabulary use and development, how fast and how much they alter the functionality of code over time and how they iterate on their code through text insert and delete operations. Many of our lessons involve providing students with demonstrator code which they use as a base for the development of their programs, so we use demo code as an entry point to our dataset. We look at programs students have written through developing the demo code in a dataset of over 16,000 programs. We clustered the demo code using the set of descriptive metrics. This lead to a set of clusters containing programs which are associated with distinct coding behaviours. Four was the ideal number of clusters for cluster density and separation. We found that the clusters had distinct behaviour patterns, that they were associated with different instructors and that they contained demo programs with different lengths

Starting with Ubicomp: using the SenseBoard to introduce computing

In this paper, we describe a new undergraduate module for novice students conducted entirely through distance learning: My Digital Life (TU100). The module has been designed to lower the barriers to creating programs that interact with the world; TU100’s materials have been designed to excite, encourage, reassure and support learners who explore the novel topic of ubiquitous computing through playful experimentation. It introduces the fundamentals of computing by giving students the capability for programming a device, the SenseBoard, which has built-in input/output and sensors. Programming is done in Sense, an extension of Scratch, which scaffolds programming and reduces the syntax burden. TU100 has taken inspiration from childhood learning and commercial product design to produce compelling, yet academically rigorous study materials

Mash-ups of Information Services for Promoting Higher Education Institution in Hanoi, Vietnam

Currently, today is the Information Era, with the typical symbol - Internet Technology. Any people can become the users of the Internet at any time. Internet is everywhere. The users can use internet to search, find or collect any information that they need. Nowadays, for sure that, any one of us heard about Web 2.0 technologies as well as applications. The development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was considered like "break through step" of the information technology. Web 2.0 is really more efficient information sharing, collaboration and business processes. And, Mash- up is one of the outcomes of Web 2.0 paradigm that has been widely accepted and used for users over the world. The role and effect of mash-ups in modern life is obvious. At the moment, although mash - ups are mainly used for less fundamental tasks, such as customized queries and map based visualizations. But, compared to a few years ago, mash-ups' development and application are becoming popular and increasing day by day with higher demands. In the future, it has the potential to be used for more fundamental, complex and sophisticated tasks. Finding, searching, collecting as well as using information in the Internet is one of problems about technology of Vietnam in general, and Hanoi in particular, where are the developing countries and be focused on the agriculture fields. Catch and combine two above events, the developers want to create "Mash - ups of Promoting Information Services Institution for Higher Education in HaNoi, Vietnam" as Final Year Project. For this project, the users just need Internet route to access. And after this, they can find out, search, collect and compare all important and necessary information about universities in Hanoi, Vietnam. This way will useful for users, because of it will minimize the effort, time as well as money of the finders. Besides, it is also easy to understand and using