Related papers: A Scratch-like visual programming system for Micro…

Teaching programming to K-12 students has become essential. In this context, App Inventor is a popular block-based programming environment used by a wide audience, from K-12 to higher education, including end-users to create mobile…

Building on prior research on Generative AI (GenAI) and related tools for programming education, we developed SCRIPT, a chatbot based on ChatGPT-4o-mini, to support novice learners. SCRIPT allows for open-ended interactions and structured…

It has been argued that computational thinking should precede computer programming in the course of a career in computing. This argument is the basis for the slogan "logic first, syntax later" and the development of many cryptic syntax…

Timely, personalized feedback is essential for students learning programming. LLM-powered tools like ChatGPT offer instant support, but reveal direct answers with code, which may hinder deep conceptual engagement. We developed CodeAid, an…

Smartphone owners often need to run security-critical programs on the same device as other untrusted and potentially malicious programs. This requires users to trust hardware and system software to correctly sandbox malicious programs,…

Dialogue systems is an increasingly popular task of natural language processing. However, the dialogue paths tend to be deterministic, restricted to the system rails, regardless of the given request or input text. Recent advances in program…

During last years development frameworks have emerged to make easier the development and maintenance of cross-platform mobile applications. Xamarin framework is one of them: it takes as input an app written in C# and produces native code…

Clinicians often face workflow problems that are perceived as either too bespoke or low stakes to attract commercial attention. Historically, most do not have the technical knowledge to address these problems, but the recent emergence of…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch are increasingly popular for programming education and end-user programming. Recent program analyses build on the insight that source code can be modelled using techniques from natural language…

Studies have shown that children can be exposed to smart devices at a very early age. This has important implications on research in children-computer interaction, children online safety and early education. Many systems have been built…

Program text is rendered using impoverished typographic styles. Beyond choice of fonts and syntax-highlighting colors, code editors and related tools utilize very few text decorations. These limited styles are, furthermore, applied in…

Game development is a highly technical practice that traditionally requires programming skills. This serves as a barrier to entry for would-be developers or those hoping to use games as part of their creative expression. While there have…

This paper describes the Bricklayer Ecosystem - a freely-available online educational ecosystem created for people of all ages and coding backgrounds. Bricklayer is designed in accordance with a "low-threshold infinite ceiling" philosophy…

Novice programmers often struggle with problem solving due to the high cognitive loads they face. Furthermore, many introductory programming courses do not explicitly teach it, assuming that problem solving skills are acquired along the…

Interactive development environments like Jupyter Notebooks enable incremental coding through cells with immediate feedback, but their linear structure and global namespace limit scalability for large software projects. We present CodePod,…

Modern computer programming languages are governed by complex syntactic rules. They are unlike natural languages; they require extensive manual work and a significant amount of learning and practicing for an individual to become skilled at…

This paper presents an experimental study regarding the use of OpenAI's ChatGPT for robotics applications. We outline a strategy that combines design principles for prompt engineering and the creation of a high-level function library which…

Code generation aims to automatically generate source code from high-level task specifications, which can significantly increase productivity of software engineering. Recently, approaches based on large language models (LLMs) have shown…

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch play a central role in low-code education, yet evaluating the capabilities of AI agents to construct programs through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) remains underexplored. We introduce…

Locating a specific mobile application screen from existing repositories is restricted to basic keyword searches, such as Google Image Search, or necessitates a complete query screen image, as in the case of Swire. However, interactive…