Since the early 1960’s, researchers have built a number of programming languages and environments with the intention of making programming accessible to a larger number of people. This article presents a taxonomy of languages and environments designed to make programming more accessible to novice programmers of all ages. The systems are organized by their primary goal, either to teach programming or to use programming to empower their users, and then, by each system’s authors ’ approach, to making learning to program easier for novice programmers. The article explains all categories in the taxonomy, provides a brief description of the systems in each category, and suggests some avenues for future work in novice programming environments and languages.

We describe Storytelling Alice, a programming environment that introduces middle school girls to computer programming as a means to the end of creating 3D animated stories. Storytelling Alice supports story creation by providing 1) a set of high-level animations, that support the use of social characters who can interact with one another, 2) a collection of 3D characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and 3) a tutorial that introduces users to writing Alice programs using storybased examples. In a study comparing girls ’ experiences learning to program using Storytelling Alice and a version of Alice without storytelling support (Generic Alice), we found that users of Storytelling Alice and Generic Alice were equally successful at learning basic programming constructs. Participants found Storytelling Alice and Generic Alice equally easy to use and entertaining. Users of Storytelling Alice were more motivated to program; they spent 42 % more time programming, were more than 3 times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs, and expressed stronger interest in future use of Alice than users

We accept this essay as conforming to the required standard

The importance of play in young children’s lives cannot be minimized. From teddy bears to blocks, children’s experiences with the tools of play can impact their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Today, the tools of play include desktop computers and computerenhanced physical environments. In this paper, we consider the merits of desktop and physical environments for young children (4-6 years old), by comparing the same contentinfused game in both contexts. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used for data collection and analysis.

a survey of programming environments and languages for novice programmers

In interactive Virtual Reality simulations it is often desirable to include simulated humans. The tools used to design the behaviours of these simulated humans are traditionally made for programmers and experts in artificial intelligence, not for experts in human behaviour. By building an authoring environment targeted at non-programmers we aim to empower human behaviour experts to create simulated humans. We present a graphical end-user tool called MindEditor. Built on Replicant Toolkit, a toolkit for simulation of human behaviour, MindEditor greatly simplifies development and testing of simulated human behaviour.

In order to create Web-enabled applications that programmatically use the Web as an expressive medium, the current choice is largely between conventional programming languages that are difficult to learn and use -- and less expressive alternatives. In order to address this issue, we have been developing CrawLogo, a Logo-inspired programming environment in which Web-elements are programmable, body-syntonic "Crawltures" that exist within a 5-dimensional Crawlture Geometry. In this paper we briefly summarize related work, describe the CrawLogo environment, some sample applications, and the initial response of end-user programmers who have successfully used it to build Web-enabled applications. We conclude with a discussion of some insights into the larger question of empowering end-user programming of the Web, the development of a Crawlture Geometry, and future research challenges.

apport de recherche