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Blocks? Graphs? Why Not Both? Designing and Evaluating a Hybrid Programming Environment for End-users

Published: 23 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Many modern end-user development environments support one of two visual modalities: block-based programming or data-flow programming. In this work, we investigate the trade-offs between the two modalities in the context of robotics tasks. These often contain both aspects that are better solved with blocks and others that best fit data-flow programming. To address this style of task, we present and discuss two novel programming environment prototypes, one purely block-based and one a hybrid of blocks and data-flow programming. We compare the designs through a controlled experiment with 113 end-user participants, in which we asked them to solve programming and program comprehension tasks using one of the two environments. We find that participants preferred the hybrid environment in direct comparison, but performed better across all tasks and also reported higher usability ratings for blocks.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-Companion '24: Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
April 2024
531 pages
ISBN:9798400705021
DOI:10.1145/3639478
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 23 May 2024

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