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Now that we have end-user programming environments capable of empowering kids with no programming background to build games in a matter of hours, a new quest for raising the ceiling of end-user development is emerging. Environments not only focusing on programming, but also including rich media such as 3D, could work as compelling tools for introducing information technology at the K-12 level. The...
Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called code thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file...
Programmers who suffer from repetitive stress injuries find it difficult to program by typing. Speech interfaces can reduce the amount of typing, but existing programming-by-voice tools make it awkward for programmers to enter and edit program text. We used a human-centric approach to address these problems. We first studied how programmers verbalize code, and found that spoken programs contain lexical,...
Novices face many barriers when learning to program, including the need to learn both a new syntax and a model of computation. By constraining syntax and providing concrete visual representations on which to operate, direct manipulation programming environments can potentially lower these barriers. However, what if the learning goal of the novice is to be able ultimately to program in conventional...
Visual programming has achieved limited success when used as a general programming language. Yet it clearly has advantages in simplifying the task of expressing executable logic. We show that a visual programming metaphor can be highly appropriate and successful when focused on the smaller task of writing snippets of code. These Visual Snippets are needed to complete a larger visual modeling and editing...
Traditional approaches to teaching computer science are often unsuccessful in attracting girls into the discipline. Our hypothesis is that presenting computer programming as a means to the end of storytelling will help motivate girls to learn to program, a traditional gateway to computer science. In this paper, we present a case study in designing a version of the Alice programming system to support...
Visula is a general-purpose object-oriented visual programming language (VPL). The language uses a new approach, by basing its notation upon UML sequence diagrams, instead of traditional control-flow or data-flow. This paper describes the notation, and presents an editing and debugging environment for the language. A usability analysis shows several potential advantages to the notation
Hand-drawn designs and annotations are a common, human-centric approach frequently used during software design and code inspection. We describe our research experiences of adding support for hand-drawn design and annotation to three integrated development environments (IDEs): a software design tool; a user interface design tool; and a programming tool. The aim of this work is to provide users with...
The VizEval Suite is an environment designed to support experimentation with and evaluation of program visualization attributes that affect the user's ability to grasp essential concepts. In this paper, we describe the VizEval Suite and an initial experiment conducted both as a test-bed of the VizEval Suite and to study how perceptual/cognitive characteristics of the visualization affect the users'...
We report on a field study about how software developers experience disorientation when using the Eclipse Java integrated development environment. We analyzed the data using the theory of visual momentum, identifying three factors that may lead to disorientation: the absence of connecting navigation context during program exploration, thrashing between displays to view necessary pieces of code, and...
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