Related papers: Common Patterns in Block-Based Robot Programs

The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…

Computational thinking is increasingly introduced at primary school level, usually with some form of programming activity. In particular, educational robots provide an opportunity for engaging students with programming through hands-on…

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are increasingly popular in programming education, in particular for young learners. While the use of blocks helps prevent syntax errors, semantic bugs remain common and difficult to…

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…

Code smells as symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Many times they are the result of so called technical debt. Our study showed that the interest in code smells research is increasing. However, most of the publications are…

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages. These systems introduce several advantages. However, as the number of languages increases, so does the challenges related to the…

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…

Large language models offer new ways of empowering people to program robot applications-namely, code generation via prompting. However, the code generated by LLMs is susceptible to errors. This work reports a preliminary exploration that…

A smell in software source code denotes an indication of suboptimal design and implementation decisions, potentially hindering the code understanding and, in turn, raising the likelihood of being prone to changes and faults. Identifying…

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code have gained significant attention recently. They can generate code in different programming languages based on provided prompts, fulfilling a long-lasting dream in Software Engineering (SE), i.e.,…

AI-based chatbots have the potential to accelerate learning and teaching, but may also have counterproductive consequences without thoughtful design and scaffolding. To better understand teachers' perspectives on large language model…

Block-based programming languages enable young learners to quickly implement fun programs and games. The Scratch programming environment is particularly successful at this, with more than 50 million registered users at the time of this…

Programming social robots is challenging for novice robot programmers due to required expertise in planning, interaction design, and programming. While large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise through code generation from…

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code…

Code smells are symptoms of potential code quality problems that may affect software maintainability, thus increasing development costs and impacting software reliability. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for…

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit a wide range of capabilities, such as writing robot code from language commands -- enabling non-experts to direct robot behaviors, modify them based on feedback, or compose them to…

Bug localization refers to the identification of source code files which is in a programming language and also responsible for the unexpected behavior of software using the bug report, which is a natural language. As bug localization is…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is being increasingly used to learn and adapt application behavior in many domains, including large-scale and safety critical systems, as for example, autonomous driving. With the advent of plug-n-play RL…

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is…

Simulation modelling systems are routinely used to test or understand real-world scenarios in a controlled setting. They have found numerous applications in scientific research, engineering, and industrial operations. Due to their complex…