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.

Although visual programming techniques have been used to lower the threshold of programming for end users, they are not sufficient for creating end user programming environments that are both easy to use and powerful. To achieve this, an environment must support the definition of programs that are not just static representations of behavior, but are instead dynamic collections of program objects which can be applied in a number of contexts rather than just a program editor. We describe an approach to end user programming called tactile programming which extends visual techniques with a unified program manipulation paradigm that makes programs easy to comprehend, compose and, most importantly, share over the World Wide Web. Tactile programming’s inherent ability to support the social context in which programming takes place along with its ability to ease program comprehension and composition is what differentiates this approach from others. In the context of the Agentsheets programming substrate, we have created an instance of a tactile programming environment called Visual AgenTalk which is used to create interactive simulations.

Isaac is a rule-based language for mobile robots currently under development at NMSU. A successor to Altaira, it replaces Altaira's state-based rules and tile-based navigation with a more general geometric reasoning mechanism. The language uses the FuzzyCLIPS expert system shell as a reasoning backend.

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Isaac is a programing language for geometric reasoning intended for controlling mobile robots, currently under development at NMSU. Due to the application area, handling input and output (in particular, sensor input and actuator output) in a manner consistent with the language as a whole is particularly important in this language. In this paper, we discuss the mechanisms employed by Isaac to provide a common framework for input, processing, and output in this language. KEYWORDS Rule−based visual languages, mobile robots, geometric reasoning 1.

Abstract. When teaching concurrency, using a process-oriented language, it is often introduced through a visual representation of programs in the form of process network diagrams. These diagrams allow the design of and abstract reasoning about programs, consisting of concurrently executing communicating processes, without needing any syntactic knowledge of the eventual implementation language. Process network diagrams are usually drawn on paper or with general-purpose diagramming software, meaning the program must be implemented as syntactically correct program code before it can be run. This paper presents POPed, an introductory parallel programming tool leveraging process network diagrams as a visual language for the creation of process-oriented programs. Using only visual layout and connection of pre-created components, the user can explore process orientation without knowledge of the underlying programming language, enabling a “processes first ” approach to parallel programming. POPed has been targeted specifically at basic robotic control, to provide a context in which introductory parallel programming can be naturally motivated.

a survey of programming environments and languages for novice programmers

Game design appears to be a promising approach to interest K-12 students in Computer Science. Unfortunately, balancing motivational and educational concerns is truly challenging. Over a number of years, we have explored how to achieve a functional balance by creating a curriculum that combines increasingly complex game designs, computational thinking patterns and authoring tools. Scalable Game Design is a research project exploring new strategies of how to scale up from after school and summer programs into required curriculum of public schools through game design approaches. The project includes inner city schools, remote rural areas and Native American communities. A requirement checklist of computational thinking tools regarding curriculum, teacher training, standards and authoring tools has been developed and is being tested with thousands of students.

Visual programming languages can be used to make computer science more accessible to a broad range of students. The evaluative focus of current research in the area of visual languages for educational purposes primarily aims to better understand motivational benefits as compared to traditional programming languages. Often these visual languages claim to teach students computational thinking concepts; however, although the evaluations show that students may exhibit more enthusiasm, it is not always clear what computational thinking concepts students have actually learned. In this paper we attempt to develop a visual semantic evaluation tool for student-created games and simulations that goes towards depicting the computational thinking concepts implemented by the students. Through semantically analyzing a given student’s created projects over time, this visual evaluation tool, called the Computational Thinking Pattern (CTP) graph, can possibly indicate the existence of computational thinking transfer from games to science simulations. 1.

Abstract. Various forms of pervasive computing environments are being deployed in an increasing number of areas including healthcare, home automation, and military. This evolution makes the development of pervasive computing applications challenging because it requires to manage a range of heterogeneous entities with a wide variety of functionalities. This paper presents Pantagruel, an approach to integrating a taxonomical description of a pervasive computing environment into a visual programming language. A taxonomy describes the relevant entities of a given pervasive computing area and serves as a parameter to a sensorcontroller-actuator development paradigm. The orchestration of areaspecific entities is supported by high-level constructs, customized with respect to taxonomical information. We have implemented a visual environment to develop taxonomies and orchestration rules. Furthermore, we have developed a compiler for Pantagruel and successfully used it for applications in various pervasive computing areas, such as home automation and building management. Key words: Visual Rule-Based Language, Pervasive Computing 1