end-user programmers often get stuck because they do not know how to overcome their barriers. We have previously presented an approach called the Idea Garden, which makes minimalist, on-demand problem-solving support ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781479903696
end-user programmers often get stuck because they do not know how to overcome their barriers. We have previously presented an approach called the Idea Garden, which makes minimalist, on-demand problem-solving support available to end-user programmers in trouble. Its goal is to encourage endusers to help themselves learn how to overcome programming difficulties as they encounter them. In this paper, we investigate whether the Idea Garden approach helps end-user programmers problem-solve their programs on their own. We ran a statistical experiment with 123 end-user programmers. The experiment's results showed that, even when the Idea Garden was no longer available, participants with little knowledge of programming who previously used the Idea Garden were able to produce higher-quality programs than those who had not used the Idea Garden.
Trigger-Action programming (TAP) allows end-users to automate IoT devices, social media, and other services. TAP systems typically offer 1) user-friendly, GUI-mediated access to service APIs through "triggers&quo...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798350376920;9798350366136
Trigger-Action programming (TAP) allows end-users to automate IoT devices, social media, and other services. TAP systems typically offer 1) user-friendly, GUI-mediated access to service APIs through "triggers" and "actions" and 2) a simplified if-this-then-that programming model. While simple, TAP's programming model lacks power and limits what its users can create. We introduce Legato, an automation platform which keeps the convenient trigger and action abstractions from TAP, but allows programmers to connect these triggers and actions with complex logic via JavaScript. Legato piggybacks on IFTTT, taking advantage of IFTTT's mature ecosystem of integrations. Additionally, Legato allows programmers to store and retrieve persistent state, schedule future events, and safely test their programs. Through a two-stage usability study, we found student programmers easily learned Legato and came up with several scenarios requiring Legato's power. Based on feedback and observation, we derive design recommendations for future highly-expressive automation systems and reflect on the role of textual programming for end-user automation.
The use of dedicated devices may insufficiently support the variety and subtlety of domestic arrangements: they usually focus on specific aspects (e.g., home automation, health, safety, etc.) and potentially become ob...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450335829
The use of dedicated devices may insufficiently support the variety and subtlety of domestic arrangements: they usually focus on specific aspects (e.g., home automation, health, safety, etc.) and potentially become obsolete, since they are unable to be recomposed and adapted to the needs of new situations. Open-ended and repurposable technologies could better address domestic users' needs. We present T4Tags 2.0, an open-ended toolkit for programming tangible tokens that embed different sensing technologies and can be attached to ordinary objects to create smart behaviors at home. We report findings from a one-day workshop we carried out to explore opportunities of the toolkit.
Future internet-of-things systems need to be able to combine heterogeneous services and support weak connectivity. In this paper, we introduce ComPOS, a new domain-specific language for composing services in IoT syste...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781538691519
Future internet-of-things systems need to be able to combine heterogeneous services and support weak connectivity. In this paper, we introduce ComPOS, a new domain-specific language for composing services in IoT systems. We show how Maria, a bird watcher, can use ComPOS to build a system that allows her to spy on birds in the garden while she is not at home. We demonstrate how ComPOS handles the unpredictable nature of IoT system by analysing in what cases Maria's system is still useful when some devices are unavailable.
In this paper we describe how to use a Game-Based Learning (GBL) approach to help end-user programmers to develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills. CT represents a framework consisting of a set of skills such as: ab...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781538604434
In this paper we describe how to use a Game-Based Learning (GBL) approach to help end-user programmers to develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills. CT represents a framework consisting of a set of skills such as: abstraction, decomposition and more in general problem solving expressed in a computational form (algorithmic thinking) that can be easily formalised into a computer program. Those skills are beneficial for end-user programmers in order to model a task for being tackled with computational tools, e.g. spreadsheets, domain specific and visual languages. TAPASPlay is an engaging GBL platform designed to help end-user to learn algorithmic thinking.
This paper explores some a novel approaches to harnessing the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as a teaching and research vehicle in education. For teaching we argue that the Internet-of-Things provides a highly motivating to...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780769550381
This paper explores some a novel approaches to harnessing the Internet-of-Things (IoT) as a teaching and research vehicle in education. For teaching we argue that the Internet-of-Things provides a highly motivating topic to capture students' imaginations, and a perfect platform for teaching computer science. In addition, we explain the potential for entire campuses or buildings to be constructed from Internet-of-Things technologies and the potential for this infrastructure to act as a teaching platform. This proposition is perfectly captured by the axiom "The college building (or campus) is the lab". This philosophy is part of a wider movement that started in the EU, called Living Labs. In achieving these aims, our work seeks to combine a number of concepts;first we utilise the Internet-of-Things, second we incorporate Living Labs ideas, third we harness the iCampus vision, forth we use the 'Smart Box' concept and finally we implement the Pervasive-interactive-programming (PiP) paradigm. We contend this approach can be used in various mixes to produce highly motivating and effective educational environments. We illustrate this work by describing the application of these ideas to a real-world venture, the Harlow UTC (in the UK). The main focus of this paper concerns the use of PiP, together with the Internet-of-Things, to teach elementary programming skills. In in support of this we present results of an evaluation of PiP with 18 participants (students and staff) of varied age and gender. The main conclusions of these evaluations were that PiP enabled students and staff, with diverse backgrounds, to quickly master the programming skills involved. The paper concludes by describing our future plans for this work.
Internet users have formed a wide array of online communities with diverse community goals and nuanced norms. However, most online platforms only offer a limited set of governance models in their software infrastructu...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798400703300
Internet users have formed a wide array of online communities with diverse community goals and nuanced norms. However, most online platforms only offer a limited set of governance models in their software infrastructure and leave little room for customization. Consequently, technical proficiency becomes a prerequisite for online communities to build governance policies in code, excluding non-programmers from participation in designing community governance. In this paper, we present Pika, a system that empowers non-programmers to author a wide range of executable governance policies. At its core, Pika incorporates a declarative language that decomposes governance policies into modular components, thereby facilitating expressive policy authoring through a user-friendly, form-based web interface. Our user studies with 10 non-programmers and 7 programmers show that Pika can empower non-programmers to author policies approximately 2.5 times faster than programmers who author in code. We also provide insights about Pika's expressivity in supporting diverse policies online communities want.
Many applications are made programmable for advanced end-users by adding facilities such as scripting and macros. Other applications take a programming language to the center stage of its UI. That is the case, for exa...
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Many applications are made programmable for advanced end-users by adding facilities such as scripting and macros. Other applications take a programming language to the center stage of its UI. That is the case, for example, of the spreadsheet formula language. While scripting has benefited from the advances of programming language research, producing mature and reusable languages, the state of UI-level languages lags behind. We claim that a better understanding of such languages is necessary. In this work, we model the semantics of existing end-user programming languages in three different domains: multimedia, spreadsheets and engineering. Our focus is on dataflow languages, a representative paradigm for end-user programmable applications. Based on this analysis, we aim to provide a better understanding of dataflow semantics as used in the context of end-user programming and propose guidelines for the design of UI-level languages for end-user programmable applications.
end-user programmers opportunistically copy-and-paste code snippets from colleagues or the web to accomplish their tasks. Unfortunately, these snippets often don't work verbatim, so these people-who are non-specia...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450380966
end-user programmers opportunistically copy-and-paste code snippets from colleagues or the web to accomplish their tasks. Unfortunately, these snippets often don't work verbatim, so these people-who are non-specialists in the programming language-make guesses and tweak the code to understand and apply it successfully. To support their desired workflow and facilitate tweaking and understanding, we built a prototype tool, TWEAKIT, that provides users with a familiar live interaction to help them understand, introspect, and reify how different code snippets would transform their data. Through a usability study with 14 data analysts, participants found the tool to be useful to understand the function of otherwise unfamiliar code, to increase their confidence about what the code does, to identify relevant parts of code specific to their task, and to proactively explore and evaluate code. Overall, our participants were enthusiastic about incorporating TWEAKIT in their own day-to-day work.
Following the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democrat...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450375443
Following the initial hype and high expectations of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), a number of creation tools have emerged to simplify development of these complex systems. These have the potential to democratise and expand application development to those without programming skills. However, while such tools allow end-user developers to build language understanding and dialog management capability into a CUI application, actually fulfilling or executing an action still requires programmatic API integration. In this paper, we look at how CUI builders that claim to be "no code required" struggle to yield more than toy examples, with an aim to provoke the community to develop better tools for CUI creation.
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