Current interactive user interface construction tools are often more of a hindrance than a benefit during the early stages of user interface design. These tools take too much time to use and force designers to specify more of the design details than they wish at this early stage. Most interface designers, especially those who have a background in graphic design, prefer to sketch early interface ideas on paper or on a whiteboard. We are developing an interactive tool called SILK that allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced very quickly and the medium is very flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be modified. In addition, our system allows designers to examine, annotate, and edit a complete history of the design. When the designer is satisfied with this early prototype, SILK can transform the sket...

The design of an effective interactive learning environment requires understanding the intricate relationships among people, tools, and problems. Many end-users do not have the necessary skills, nor the time or patience to compose programs from computer science-sanctioned programming primitives. End-users require environments that elevate the task of programming to the manipulation of components that are directly pertinent to the problems to be solved. This paper introduces the Agentsheets programming substrate employed by designers to create interactive learning environments that are geared toward end-users solving specific problems. A number of educational

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Building upon years of evolution in object-oriented programming language design, Java has emerged as the language of choice among many educators for teaching introductory computer science. A clean, type-safe language, Java provides a garbage collected heap and a comprehensive exception-handling mechanism. However, in spite of this support, many students in introductory computer science courses still find programming to be an overwhelming source of frustration. Linguistic concerns and programming mechanics demand so much attention that deeper concepts are often postponed for later courses, leaving students in introductory courses with the mistaken impression that computer science is a shallow discipline, concerned only with transcribing ideas into code, and not with the ideas themselves. JPie is a tightly integrated programming environment for live software construction in Java. JPie treats programming as an application in its own right, providing a visual representation of class definitions and supporting direct manipulation of graphical representations of programming abstractions and constructs. Exploiting Java’s reflection mechanism, JPie supports the notion of a dynamic class that can be modified while the program is running, thereby eliminating the edit-compile-test cycle. Following years of experience using Java as the vehicle for teaching introductory computer science, we have designed JPie to provide a more natural and fluid software development process that both raises the level of abstraction and eliminates many of the common pitfalls that beginning Java programmers face. This paper studies JPie from an educational perspective. We systematically review key programming abstractions and explain how JPie supports them in ways that keep beginning programmers focused on important ideas. Our experience using JPie in an introductory computer science survey course for non-majors is briefly discussed. 1

Domain-oriented systems offer many potential benefits for end-users such as more intuitive interfaces, better task support, and knowledge-based assistance. A key challenge for system developers constructing domain-oriented systems is determining what the current domain is and what the future domain should be; i.e. what entities should the system embody and how should they be represented. Determining an appropriate domain model is challenging because domains are not static entities that objectively exist, but instead they are dynamic entities that are constructed over time by a community of practice. New software development models and new computational tools are needed that support these communities to create initial models of the domain and to evolve these models over time to meet changing needs and practices. We describe a specific software development model and computational tools that enable domain practitioners to participate in domain construction processes. KEYWORDS: software d...

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The notion of icons in visual environments is limited by perceiving icons as tacit entities that have meaning only to human beings and not to the machines that display them. This perception leads to visual tools that provide very little support for the creation of related icons representing related concepts. A large number of complex icons can be generated automatically by applying simple syntactic and semantic transformations to more fundamental icons. These transformations can significantly reduce the laborious work of icon designers and programmers. This paper describes some of the essential icon transformations that have emerged from the experience of 25 designers using the Agentsheets system and creating a total of 500 icons. Keywords agents, incremental programming, spatial metaphor, visual programming, syntactic transformation, semantic transformation, flow metaphor, topology, picture extrapolation 1. Introduction..................................................................

Problem solving using complex mathematical models of the physical phenomena requires expert knowledge in a variety of fields of computer science, such as parallel computing and numerical methods. This often makes application scientists, who have the domain expertise to devise the mathematical models, unable to use the power of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. SciAgents is a problem solving environment to allow these models and systems to become truly easy to use for the application scientists, much like PC-based systems. It is based on the agent-oriented model of computing. In this paper, we discuss the design and architecture of SciAgents. We present a set of artificial/computational intelligence techniques used by the cooperating agents that constitute SciAgents , which allows them to complete the program specification and to carry out the program execution with minimal need for user intervention. We describe the design in context of scientific computing models based on par...

In interactive simulations it is often desirable to have intelligent actors playing the roles of humans. Drawing on a wide range of previous work this paper presents a system that is intended to reduce some of the diculties involved in the development of actors. We present a system called EASE (End-user Actor Specication Environment) that provides tools and methods to support end user development of intelligent actors. The tools support the whole development process from design to testing. The EASE actor architecture is a multi-agent system where a process of contract making and negotiation between agents determines the actions of the actor. 1 Introduction In modern, complex, interactive simulations it is often highly desirable to have intelligent actors playing the roles of humans. The actors' task is dicult { sensing the (simulated) environment, choosing a course of action that exibly and intelligently follows designer intentions and sending appropriate commands back to ...