Heuristic Evaluation for Novice Programming Systems

The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For designers of such systems, assessing the respective quality of competing design decisions can be equally difficult. Heuristic evaluation provides a practical method of assessing the quality of alternatives in these situations and of identifying potential problems with existing systems for a given target group or context. Existing sets of heuristics, however, are not specific to the domain of novice programming and thus do not evaluate all aspects of interest to us in this specialised application domain. In this article, we propose a set of heuristics to be used in heuristic evaluations of novice programming systems. These heuristics have the potential to allow a useful assessment of the quality of a given system with lower cost than full formal user studies and greater precision than the use of existing sets of heuristics. The heuristics are described and discussed in detail. We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of the heuristics that suggests that the new set of heuristics provides additional useful information to designers not obtained with existing heuristics sets

EU Business Law and Digital Revolution : Selected Studies from New Fields of Technology

The first chapter (I. Artificial Intelligence: legal implications) reflects on the growing importance of using artificial intelligence and the role of the legal regulation. The articles pose questions form general as well as specific perspectives and illustrates the legal problems of the artificial intelligence by varieties of topics, from the public procurements to the supply chains. The second chapter collects the papers that are focusing on the new instruments of exchange (II. Cryptocurrencies). The chapter lays down the conceptual basis of cryptocurrencies and examines the legal and regulatory challenges arising from the current use and the probable future prevalence of the virtual currencies. The third chapter of the book pays attention to emerging fields of regulations (III. Business and digitalization). The papers examine the adoption of technological innovations in higher education, e-commerce related aspects of computer games, legal challenges of smart contracts and autonomous vehicles