In recent years, the US has begun scaling up efforts to increase access to CS in K-12 classrooms and many teachers are turning to block-based programming environments to minimize the syntax and conceptual challenges s...
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In recent years, the US has begun scaling up efforts to increase access to CS in K-12 classrooms and many teachers are turning to block-based programming environments to minimize the syntax and conceptual challenges students encounter in text-based languages. Block-based programming environments, such as Scratch and App Inventor, are currently being used by millions of students in and outside of classroom. We know that when novice programmers are learning to program in block-based programming environments, they need to understand the components of these environments, how to apply programming concepts, and how to create artifacts. However, we still do not know how are students' learning these components or what learning challenges they face that hinder their future participation in CS. In addition, the mental effort/cognitive workload students bear while learning programming constructs is still an open question. The goal of my dissertation research is to leverage advances in Electroencephalography (EEG) research to explore how students learn CS concepts, write programs, and complete programming tasks in block-based and hybrid programming environments and understand the relationship between cognitive load and their learning.
There is widespread evidence to show that many first year engineering students have either a strong dislike for programming or an inability to write effective programs. This poses a problem, since many departments req...
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There is widespread evidence to show that many first year engineering students have either a strong dislike for programming or an inability to write effective programs. This poses a problem, since many departments require their students to take some form of introductory programming as part of their first year in engineering. One possible reason why many engineering students have such difficulty with programming and the related concepts is that many engineers tend to fall heavily on the ldquovisual learnerrdquo side of the Felder-Silverman learning styles model. Since traditional, text-based programming languages, and the predominantly text-based way in which they are taught, do not align with the learning styles of these students, their ability to understand and implement the necessary concepts in an actual program may be drastically reduced. This paper discusses a work in progress investigating the use of graphical programming languages as a means for introducing programming concepts and catering to the visual learning style of most engineering students.
Discussion of the future software increasingly requires a careful distinction between application-facing software and hardware-facing software. Programmers of application-facing software will increasingly have to bala...
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Discussion of the future software increasingly requires a careful distinction between application-facing software and hardware-facing software. Programmers of application-facing software will increasingly have to balance speed, reliability, and accuracy as competing goals. Programmers of hardware-facing software will increasingly have to manage data placement, power consumption, and the choices presented by heterogeneous processors. By making these tradeoffs explicit for both programming environments, we will be able to overcome these challenges and potentially will discover new approaches that are not possible with presently available tools.
In this paper, we present the Yestercode tool for supporting code changes in visual dataflow programming environments. In a formative investigation of LabVIEW programmers, we found that making code changes posed a sig...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781509002535
In this paper, we present the Yestercode tool for supporting code changes in visual dataflow programming environments. In a formative investigation of LabVIEW programmers, we found that making code changes posed a significant challenge. To address this issue, we designed Yestercode to enable the efficient recording, retrieval, and juxtaposition of visual dataflow code while making code changes. To evaluate Yestercode, we implemented our design as a prototype extension to the LabVIEW programming environment, and ran a user study involving 14 professional LabVIEW programmers that compared Yestercode-extended LabVIEW to the standard LabVIEW IDE. Our results showed that Yestercode users introduced fewer bugs during tasks, completed tasks in about the same time, and experienced lower cognitive loads on tasks. Moreover, participants generally reported that Yestercode was easy to use and that it helped in making change tasks easier.
As software systems grow in size and complexity, the demand for languages and tools to capture higher order abstractions than those supported by programming languages increases. One of these abstractions is the archit...
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As software systems grow in size and complexity, the demand for languages and tools to capture higher order abstractions than those supported by programming languages increases. One of these abstractions is the architectural design, which specifies a system's components, their interfaces, and their interrelationships using textual or visual notations. Although there have been significant advances in programming languages and environments, research into languages and tools for architectural design is still preliminary. Moreover there has been little emphasis on integrating design tools with existing programming environments. The paper describes how the Object Oriented Turing programming environment was extended to accommodate languages and tools for specifying and visualizing architectural designs.< >
Running AES on different platforms concludes that AES performance is changing depending on the platform it is run. In this article we run these benchmarks and observe the behavior of AES algorithm on several programmi...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781424474325;9781424474332
Running AES on different platforms concludes that AES performance is changing depending on the platform it is run. In this article we run these benchmarks and observe the behavior of AES algorithm on several programming environments, on different operating systems and on various computational platforms trying to notice which one offers the best performance.
Sustainable development is raising increasing interest and efforts are being devoted worldwide in order to introduce the notion of sustainability in the curricula, from schools to PhD programs. The focus of this work ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781467351133
Sustainable development is raising increasing interest and efforts are being devoted worldwide in order to introduce the notion of sustainability in the curricula, from schools to PhD programs. The focus of this work is on reporting a teaching and learning experience aimed at introducing the students to the culture of sustainability, by means of a project that utilizes a leading visual programming environment and web 2.0 technologies, and is suitable for a relatively large group. The key idea was to tell a story through a computational artifact, whose development requires critical and creative thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration skills [6] as well as information literacy. This paper describes the pedagogical design of the activities, their objectives, class management issues, and the scaffolds to designing the animated story, to be implemented using a cutting edge, syntax-free visual language called Scratch. Both the humanistic and the scientific aspects were to be covered in each story about a selected topic in sustainability, in order to involve as much as possible of the teaching spectrum and create a truly interdisciplinary environment. The developed Scratch-based solution is also suitable for deployment on mobile devices using the App Inventor visual programming language.
The dispatching process and operative management of the hydro-power plants complex is based on distributed automation architectures hierarchically structured. The plant floor level - technological process interface fo...
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The dispatching process and operative management of the hydro-power plants complex is based on distributed automation architectures hierarchically structured. The plant floor level - technological process interface for data acquisition is represented by programmable logic controllers (PLC) and intelligent measuring devices (embedded systems). The above mentioned devices communicate on industrial data buses with high-performance computers as the logging device. The data processing and storage create the possibility of decisions support for the energy production management and the optimization of the resources exploitation. The data communication between physical resources and structured hierarchical levels is implemented on standard communication protocols (Profibus and Modbus and others) logically driven by OPC mechanism for data source access
Over the last six years, we have been working to create programming languagesand environments that are more natural, or closer to the way people think about their tasks. Ourgoal is to make it possible for people to ex...
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Over the last six years, we have been working to create programming languagesand environments that are more natural, or closer to the way people think about their tasks. Ourgoal is to make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about *** achieve this, we have performed various studies about how people think about programming tasks,both when trying to create a new program and when trying to find and fix bugs in existing *** then use this knowledge to develop new tools for programming and debugging. Our user studies haveshown the resulting systems provide significant benefits to users.
The authors describe Visual Programmers Workbench (VPW), which addresses the rapid synthesis of programming environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. A language-based environment ...
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The authors describe Visual Programmers Workbench (VPW), which addresses the rapid synthesis of programming environments for the specification, analysis, and execution of visual programs. A language-based environment for a specific visual language is generated in VPW from a specification of the syntactic structure, the abstract structure, the static semantics, and the dynamic semantics of the language. VPW is built around a model of distributed processing based on shared distributed memory. This framework is used both for defining the architecture of the environment and for the execution model of programming languages. The VPW has been used to experiment with visual programming environments for several visual languages. The design of the Visual Programmers Workbench and experience with using it to generate a distributed programming environment for a concurrent visual language are described.< >
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