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Pocket Code is a free and open source mobile visual programming system for the Catrobat language. It allows users, starting from the age of eight, to develop games and animations with their smartphones. Children can create programs with…
Catroid is a free and open source visual programming language, programming environment, image manipulation program, and website. Catroid allows casual and first-time users starting from age eight to develop their own animations and games…
The number of women in technical fields is far below the average number of males, especially in developed countries. Gender differences in STEM are already present in secondary schools in students aged between 12 to 15 years. Adolescence is…
Creative coding platforms like Scratch have democratized programming for children, yet translating imaginative ideas into functional code remains a significant hurdle for many young learners. While AI copilots assist adult programmers, few…
The scarcity of large-scale, high-quality demonstration data remains a bottleneck in scaling imitation learning for robotic manipulation. We present COBALT, a teleoperation platform designed to democratize robot learning at scale both in…
The number of women in IT-related disciplines is far below the number of men, especially in developed countries. Middle-school girls appear to be engaged in coding courses, but when they choose academic majors relevant to their future…
There is a burgeoning trend of smartphone ownership in Africa due to the low costs of Android smartphones and the global increase in social media usage. Building upon previous works that introduced a smartphone-based coding course to…
As Computational Thinking (CT) continues to permeate younger age groups in K-12 education, established CT platforms such as Scratch face challenges in catering to these younger learners, particularly those in the elementary school (ages…
During last ten years, the number of smartphones and mobile applications has been constantly growing. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile are three mobile platforms that cover almost all smartphones in the world in 2017. Developing a mobile app…
We developed a website for kids where they can share new as well as remixed animations and games, e.g., interactive music videos, which they created on their smartphones or tablets using a visual "LEGO-style" programming environment called…
Object recognition has made great advances in the last decade, but predominately still relies on many high-quality training examples per object category. In contrast, learning new objects from only a few examples could enable many impactful…
The automotive industry has transitioned from being an electro-mechanical to a software-intensive industry. A current high-end production vehicle contains 100 million+ lines of code surpassing modern airplanes, the Large Hadron Collider,…
Recent studies from all over the world show that more boys than girls play video games. The numbers are different for mobile gaming apps, where 65% of women are identified as gamers. Adapting game design activities for academic purposes is…
Mobile apps provide new opportunities to people with disabilities to act independently in the world. Motivated by this trend, researchers have conducted empirical studies by using the inaccessibility issue rate of each page (i.e., screen…
Code generation tools driven by artificial intelligence have recently become more popular due to advancements in deep learning and natural language processing that have increased their capabilities. The proliferation of these tools may be a…
Current robots are either expensive or make significant compromises on sensory richness, computational power, and communication capabilities. We propose to leverage smartphones to equip robots with extensive sensor suites, powerful…
Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors…
The proliferation of open-source scientific software for science and research presents opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we introduce the SciCat dataset -- a comprehensive collection of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)…
The emergence of large language models has enabled vibe coding, a natural language approach to programming in which users describe intent and AI generates or revises code, potentially broadening access to programming while preserving…
Scratch is a programming environment and an online community where young people can create, share, learn, and communicate. In collaboration with the Scratch Team at MIT, we created a longitudinal dataset of public activity in the Scratch…