Paper Reading # 17: A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

Comments

Cindy Skach
Evin Schuchardt

Reference Information

Title: A code reuse interface for non-programmer middle school students

Authors: Paul A. Gross  Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA 
              Micah S. Herstand  Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA 
              Jordana W. Hodges  The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA 
              Caitlin L. Kelleher  Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA 
           

Presentation Venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces; 
ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010

Summary

In this paper, the authors discuss an interface that allows non programmers (i.e: middle school students) to reuse code without requiring prior programming knowledge.  The interface is implemented for the Looking Glass IDE; the next version of storytelling Alice. Alice was a freeware object-oriented educational programming language with an integrated development environment (IDE) developed in the late nineties.

The way the environment is initially set up is with stories upon which functionality can be added. They give the example of a virtual girl, Melley, whose task is to develop super strength and knock a house over. After finding a similar story from a library(i.e: an agent who jumps at an "evil" doctor and knocks him down.), the user has to "steal" the story's Actionscript which starts the reuse process. The action occurring is then recorded. Provided with helper tools, the user can select the relevant code that will be used in his/her own story. To integrate the new code within the current story, the user must specify the taget actors of the script. In the example given, Melley would carry out the agent's task, and the house would carry out the "evil" doctor role. Hence, when the new script is played, you see Melley jumping, and knocking down a house just like we wanted. To resolve the possible issue of mapping actions to objects of different sizes the user has to reference subparts by name and choose more subparts if there is no match. 

A user study was performed with 47 students. The grade pool was from sixth to eighth grade. The students were given a tutorial, and then examples. They also were asked for feedback after usage. Students worked in groups and showed each other their animations. This encouraged them to reuse animations. 77% of the actions used in the animation contained more than five lines of code. Finally, the students took a quiz at the end of the study. They found that students who tried tinkering with the given code, rather than copying it, performed well on the quizzes.

Discussion

This paper was interesting. I always regretted not being exposed to programming concepts before arriving to college. With regards to the aforementioned program, Alice, I had read, and seen videos about it before. I believe it stems from Carnegie Mellon, and is related to the late Randy Pausch's research, if my memory serves me right. I actually tried the Alice program about two years back and liked it, so I'm on board with this present research.