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Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

The widespread establishment of computational thinking in school curricula requires teachers to introduce children to programming already at primary school level. As this is a recent development, primary school teachers may neither be…

Machine learning models have been trained to predict semantic information about user interfaces (UIs) to make apps more accessible, easier to test, and to automate. Currently, most models rely on datasets that are collected and labeled by…

With the emergence of deep learning techniques, smartphone apps are now embedded on-device AI features for enabling advanced tasks like speech translation, to attract users and increase market competitiveness. A good interaction design is…

Lowering the barriers to computer programming requires understanding how to scaffold learning. Parsons problems, which require learners to drag-and-drop blocks of code into the correct order and indentation, are proving to be beneficial for…

With the increasing maturity and scale of quantum hardware and its integration into HPC systems, there is a need to develop robust techniques for developing, characterizing, and benchmarking quantum-HPC applications and middleware systems.…

Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…

Identifiers make up a majority of the text in code. They are one of the most basic mediums through which developers describe the code they create and understand the code that others create. Therefore, understanding the patterns latent in…

AI code generators like OpenAI Codex have the potential to assist novice programmers by generating code from natural language descriptions, however, over-reliance might negatively impact learning and retention. To explore the implications…

With children talking to smart-speakers, smart-phones and even smart-microwaves daily, it is increasingly important to educate students on how these agents work-from underlying mechanisms to societal implications. Researchers are developing…

Introductory programming courses often rely on small code-writing exercises that have clearly specified problem statements. This limits opportunities for students to practice how to clarify ambiguous requirements -- a critical skill in…

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes decision-making across domains, there is a growing need to support AI literacy among learners beyond computer science. However, many current approaches rely on programming-heavy tools or…

Creating functions is at the center of writing computer programs. But there has been little empirical research on how this is done and what are the considerations that developers use. We design an experiment in which we can compare the…

Reliability is key to realizing the promise of autonomous UI-Agents, multimodal agents that directly interact with apps in the same manner as humans, as users must be able to trust an agent to complete a given task. Current evaluations rely…

Software engineers make use of design patterns for reasons that range from performance to code comprehensibility. Several design patterns capturing the body of knowledge of best practices have been proposed in the past, namely creational,…

The rise of quantum computing has driven the need for quantum software engineering, yet its programming landscape remains largely unexplored in empirical research. As quantum technologies advance toward industrial adoption, understanding…

Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter, have been widely adopted by data scientists to write code for analyzing and visualizing data. Despite their growing adoption and popularity, there has been no thorough study to understand Jupyter…

The better developers can learn software tools, the faster they can start using them and the more efficiently they can later work with them. Tutorials are supposed to help here. While in the early days of computing, mostly text tutorials…

Novice programmers face numerous barriers while attempting to learn how to code that may deter them from pursuing a computer science degree or career in software development. In this work, we propose a tool concept to address the…

The proliferation of mobile applications (apps) has made it crucial to ensure their accessibility for users with disabilities. However, there is a lack of research on the real-world challenges developers face in implementing mobile…