Predicting reuse of end-user web macro scripts

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Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

Formal Visual Modeling of Real-Time Systems in e-Motions: Two Case Studies

e-Motions is an Eclipse-based visual timed model transformation framework with a Real-Time Maude semantics that supports the usual Maude formal analysis methods, including simulation, reachability analysis, and LTL model checking. e-Motions is characterized by a novel and powerful set of constructs for expressing timed behaviors. In this paper we illustrate the use of these constructs --- and thereby implicitly investigate their suitability to define real-time systems in an intuitive way --- to define and formally analyze two prototypical and very different real-time systems: (i) a simple round trip time protocol for computing the time it takes a message to travel from one node to another, and back; and (ii) the EDF scheduling algorithm.Comment: In Proceedings AMMSE 2011, arXiv:1106.596

SocioEconomicMag Meets a Platform for SES-Diverse College Students: A Case Study

Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology's SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag), an emerging inspection method for socio+economic inclusivity. In our 16-month case study, a software team developing a learning management platform used SESMag to evaluate and then to improve their platform's SES-inclusivity. The results showed that (1) the practitioners identified SES-inclusivity bugs in 76% of the features they evaluated; (2) these inclusivity bugs actually arise among low-SES college students; and (3) the SESMag process pointed ways towards fixing these bugs. Finally, (4) a user study with SES-diverse college students showed that the platform's SES-inclusivity eradicated 45-54% of the bugs; for some types of bugs, the bug instance eradication rate was 80% or higher.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

A cognitive exploration of the “non-visual” nature of geometric proofs

Why are Geometric Proofs (Usually) “Non-Visual”? We asked this question as a way to explore the similarities and differences between diagrams and text (visual thinking versus language thinking). Traditional text-based proofs are considered (by many to be) more rigorous than diagrams alone. In this paper we focus on human perceptual-cognitive characteristics that may encourage textual modes for proofs because of the ergonomic affordances of text relative to diagrams. We suggest that visual-spatial perception of physical objects, where an object is perceived with greater acuity through foveal vision rather than peripheral vision, is similar to attention navigating a conceptual visual-spatial structure. We suggest that attention has foveal-like and peripheral-like characteristics and that textual modes appeal to what we refer to here as foveal-focal attention, an extension of prior work in focused attention

Formal Modeling of Communication Platforms using Reconfigurable Algebraic High-Level Nets

Communication nowadays is based on communication platforms like Skype, Facebook, or SecondLife. The formal modeling and analysis of communication platforms poses considerable challenges, namely highly dynamic structures and complex behavior. Since most of the well-known formal modeling approaches are adequate only for specific aspects of communication platforms, in this paper we introduce the approach of reconfigurable algebraic high-level nets with individual tokens and show in our case study Skype that this approach is adequate for modeling the main aspects and features of communication platforms

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Diagramming practices in open source software development

Visual information presented in diagrams promotes information processing both in an individual and in collaborative work. Previous literature has identified the role of diagrams in understanding information processing in a variety of disciplines. In software engineering, diagrams are a prevalent method involved in process development: diagrams are used for system comprehension, design of architecture, design and improvement of usability and communication with developers. Free/Open Source software (FOSS) development is a highly distributed environment where developers and users share content over multiple sites and communicate through computer-mediated channels. However, prior research lacks a deep understanding of diagramming practices in OSS. To understand how and why diagramming practices occur in FOSS, we first conducted interviews with nine contributors from a single project, Ubuntu. Next, to generalize our study, we conducted a large-scale survey with contributors from a wide range of FOSS communities as well as follow-up interviews that provided insights into understanding their diagramming practices. We found that although contributors mostly agree that diagram use has positive effects toward development, FOSS contributors occasionally are not willing to use them due to a lack of supporting tools outside of the conventions related to FOSS culture. We propose that diagramming practices can support and promote collaboration in FOSS. This thesis is composed of three manuscripts. First, we study diagramming practices in the Ubuntu project. Second, we report diagramming practices, focusing on design-oriented activities in which developers and designers extensively use diagrams in collocated development. We also investigate whether or not OSS contributors appreciate diagramming practices for design-oriented activities in non-collocated development. We finally report how and why diagramming practices occur in FOSS communities