Artificial Intelligence

Contains reports on two research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant G-16526)National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-03)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496)Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research (Contract Number Nonr-4102(01)

iVoLVER : Interactive Visual Language for Visualization Extraction and Reconstruction

We present the design and implementation of iVoLVER, a tool that allows users to create visualizations without textual programming. iVoLVER is designed to enable flexible acquisition of many types of data (text, colors, shapes, quantities, dates) from multiple source types (bitmap charts, webpages, photographs, SVGs, CSV files) and, within the same canvas, supports transformation of that data through simple widgets to construct interactive animated visuals. Aside from the tool, which is web-based and designed for pen and touch, we contribute the design of the interactive visual language and widgets for extraction, transformation, and representation of data. We demonstrate the flexibility and expressive power of the tool through a set of scenarios, and discuss some of the challenges encountered and how the tool fits within the current infovis tool landscape.Postprin

Introdução: O que é o Logo? E a quem faz falta?

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Student engagement is key to broadening participation in CS

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. The Mobile CS Principles (Mobile CSP) course is one of the NSF-supported, College Board-endorsed curricula for the new Computer Science Principles AP course. Since 2013, the Mobile CSP project has trained more than 700 teachers, and the course has been offered to more than 20,000 students throughout the United States. The organizing philosophy behind the Mobile CSP course is that student engagement in the classroom is the key to getting students, especially those traditionally underrepresented in CS, interested in pursuing further study and careers in CS. The main strategies used to engage Mobile CSP students are: (1) a focus on mobile computing throughout the course, taking advantage of current student interest in smartphones; (2) an emphasis on getting students building mobile apps from day one, by utilizing the highly accessible App Inventor programming language; and (3) an emphasis on building creative,\u27socially useful\u27 apps to get students thinking about ways that computing can help their communities. In this paper we present and summarize two years of data of various types (i.e., student surveys, teacher surveys, objective assessments, and anecdotal reports from students and teachers) to support the hypothesis that engagement of the sort practiced in the Mobile CSP course not only helps broaden participation in CS among hard-to-reach demographics, but also provides them with a solid grounding in computer science principles and practices

Using Pirate Plunder to develop children’s abstraction skills in Scratch

Scratch users often struggle to detect and correct ‘code smells’ (bad programming practices) such as duplicated blocks and large scripts, which can make programs difficult to understand and debug. These ‘smells’ can be caused by a lack of abstraction, a skill that plays a key role in computer science and computational thinking. We created Pirate Plunder, a novel educational block-based programming game, that aims to teach children to reduce smells by reusing code in Scratch. This work describes an experimental study designed to measure the efficacy of Pirate Plunder with children aged 10 and 11. The findings were that children who played the game were then able to use custom blocks (procedures) to reuse code in Scratch, compared to non-programming and programming control groups

A Teaching System To Learn Programming: the Programmer's Learning Machine

International audienceThe Programmer's Learning Machine (PLM) is an interactive exerciser for learning programming and algorithms. Using an integrated and graphical environment that provides a short feedback loop, it allows students to learn in a (semi)-autonomous way. This generic platform also enables teachers to create specific programming microworlds that match their teaching goals. This paper discusses our design goals and motivations, introduces the existing material and the proposed microworlds, and details the typical use cases from the student and teacher point of views

A Scenario-Based Methodology for Exploring Risks:Children and Programmable IoT

In this paper we report on research exploring the privacy, security and safety implications of children being able to program Internet of Things devices. We present our methodology for understanding the contexts in which children may wish to use programmable IoT, identifying risks that emerge in such contexts, and creating a set of questions that might guide design of such technologies so that they are safe for child users. We evaluate the success of the methodology, discuss the limitations of the approach, and describe future work