Novice Programming Environments

In 2011, the author published an article that looked at the state of the art in novice programming environments. At the time, there had been an increase in the number of programming environments that were freely available for use by novice programmers, particularly children and young people. What was interesting was that they offered a relatively sophisticated set of development and support features within motivating and engaging environments, where programming could be seen as a means to a creative end, rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, these environments incorporated support for the social and collaborative aspects of learning. The article considered five environments—Scratch, Alice, Looking Glass, Greenfoot, and Flip—examining their characteristics and investigating the opportunities they might offer to educators and learners alike. It also considered the broader implications of such environments for both teaching and research. In this chapter, the author revisits the same five environments, looking at how they have changed in the intervening years. She considers their evolution in relation to changes in the field more broadly (e.g., an increased focus on “programming for all”) and reflects on the implications for teaching, as well as research and further development.

Agent-Based Modelling of Emotional Goals in Digital Media Design Projects

The author promotes agent-oriented models to identify, represent, and evaluate high-level abstractions of digital media design projects. The models include emotional goals, in addition to functional goals and quality goals, to describe feelings such as having fun, being engaged, and feeling cared for. To establish emotional goals, digital media design methods and processes were employed including the development of emotional scripts, user profiles, mood boards and followed an iterative creative design process. Using agent-oriented models proved to be highly successful not only to represent emotional goals such as fun, tension, and empathy but also to facilitate the ideation, creation, and progressive evaluation of projects. The design process supported communication between designers, developers, and other stakeholders in large multidisciplinary development teams by providing a shared language and a common artefact. The process is demonstrated by describing the development of Aspergion, a multiplayer online role play game that promotes respect for people with Asperger's Syndrome.

From Natural Language to Programming Language

Programming remains a dark art for beginners or even professional programmers. Experience indicates that one of the first barriers for learning a new programming language is the rigid and unnatural syntax and semantics. After analysis of research on the language features used by non-programmers in describing problem solving, the authors propose a new program synthesis framework, dialog-based programming, which interprets natural language descriptions into computer programs without forcing the input formats. In this chapter, they describe three case studies that demonstrate the functionalities of this program synthesis framework and show how natural language alleviates challenges for novice programmers to conduct software development, scripting, and verification.

Blue, BlueJ, Greenfoot

Educational programming systems are booming. More systems of this kind have been published in the last few years than ever before, and interest in this area is growing. With the rise of programming as a school subject in ever-younger age groups, the importance of dedicated educational systems for programming education is increasing. In the past, professional environments were often used in programming teaching; with the shift to younger age groups, this is no longer tenable. New educational systems are currently being designed by a diverse group of developing teams, in industry, in academia, and by hobbyists. In this chapter, the authors describe their experiences with the design of three systems—Blue, BlueJ, and Greenfoot—and extract lessons that they hope may be useful for designers of future systems. The authors also discuss current developments, and suggest an area of interest where future work might be profitable for many users: the combination of aspects from block-based and text-based programming. They present their work in this area—frame-based editing—and suggest possible future development options.

Adding Emotions to Models in a Viewpoint Modelling Framework From Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

In modern software development, considering the viewpoints of stakeholders is an important step in building the right system. Over the past decade, several authors have proposed solutions to capture and model these viewpoints. While these solutions have been successful, emotions of stakeholders have been largely ignored. Considering the emotional needs of stakeholders is important because both the users' perceptions of a product and their use of a product are influenced by emotion as much as cognition. Building on recent work in modelling the emotional goals of stakeholders, the authors extend an existing viewpoint framework to capture emotions, and to use emotions in models from early-phase requirements to detailed software design. They demonstrate the models and framework with a case study of an emergency alarm system for older people, presenting a complete set of models for the case study. The authors introduce recent experience in using emotional models in requirements elicitation within an agile process.

Cultural Probes as a People-Oriented Method

This chapter reflects on some of the methodological aspects of the use of cultural probes (or probes) and the extent to which they constitute a people-oriented method. The authors review different kinds of probes, documenting and analyzing two separate deployments—technology probes and informational probes—in a care setting. They suggest that probes, when deployed in this fashion, reflect a “post-disciplinary” era of “messy” data and a shift of attention beyond “the social” to greater concern with individual variation, personal aggregated datasets in technology design, materiality, and the visual. The authors also suggest that in an era of big data, through considering everyday development in terms of personhood, everyday technology and practice, probes can play an important role in providing insights concerning the product of people-oriented programming and, potentially, its process.

UAPPI

This chapter describes the opportunities offered by an extension of MIT App Inventor 2 named UDOO App Inventor (UAPPI). UAPPI aims to facilitate learning in programming the behavior of objects in the physical world (e.g., internet of things). In addition, UAPPI offers the opportunity to experiment with the emerging field of interactive machine learning. Two case studies devoted to different user groups are described to illustrate these opportunities. In the first, dedicated to middle school students, a door is made interactive; in the second, aimed at interaction designers, a light source is controlled by the blink of the eyes and the smile intensity.

Merging Social Networking With Learning Systems to Form New Personalized Learning Environments (PLE)

The future of learning environments lies with the merging of the better aspects of learning management systems (LMS), with those popularized in social networking platforms, to personalize the individual learning experience in a PLE (personal learning environment). After examining the details of a particularly flexible LMS, followed by the investigation of several key data structures behind the Facebook social networking platform, this chapter demonstrates how such a merging can be done at the conceptual schema level, and presents a list of novel features that it then enables.

Interdisciplinary Design Teams Translating Ethnographic Field Data Into Design Models

Translating ethnographic field data to engineering requirements and design models suitable for implementing socio-technical systems is problematic. Ethnographic field data is often “messy” and unstructured, while requirements models are organized and systematic. Cooperation and communication within an interdisciplinary design team makes the process even more complicated. A shared understanding between ethnographers, interaction designers, and software engineers is vital to ensure that complex and subtle social interactions present in the data are considered in the final system design. One solution for supporting team conversations uses the quality goal construct as a container for complex and ambiguous interaction attributes. Quality goals in system modelling promote shared understandings and collaborative design solutions by retaining a high level of abstraction for as long as possible during the design process. This chapter illustrates the effectiveness of abstract goals for conveying complex and ambiguous information in the design of a socio-technical system supporting social interaction between couples.

A Design Method for People-Oriented Programming

The miniature Raspberry Pi computer has become of interest to many researchers as a platform for building sociotechnical IoT systems for end-users; however, for the end-user to design and build such apps themselves requires new people-oriented tools and design methods. This chapter describes a people-oriented design method called TANDEM and demonstrates the use of it in detail, by way of a case study—the design of a mashup of services and local data stores—that solves the so-called movie-cinema problem. An implementation of the newly designed movie-cinema app is then built within the DigitalFriend, an end-user programmer IDE. Furthermore, a significant part of the TANDEM design method is then automated within the development tool itself. This automation removes the most skilled task required by TANDEM of the end-user: the automation of the process of data normalization. The automation applies data normalization to the initial model of components and data sources that feed into the mashup. The presentation here relies on some understanding of data normalization, so a simple example is presented. After this demonstrated example of the method and the implementation, the authors discuss the applicability of a model achievable by end-users using TANDEM coupled with the automated normalization process built into the IDE vs. using a top-down model by an experienced information analyst. In conclusion, the TANDEM method combined with the automation as demonstrated does empower an end-user to a significant degree in achieving a workable mashup of distributed services and local data stores and feeds. Such a powerful combination of methods and tools will help the Raspberry Pi to become a significant people-oriented platform, beyond just a platform for teaching novices to code. Furthermore, the TANDEM method does have broader applicability to designing a broad class of logic programs, complementing the use of collected patterns in logic programs.