Jill Cao

Gender pluralism in problem-solving software

Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools, such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic, we believe that closer examination of this premise is warranted. Therefore, in this paper, we report an end-to-end investigation into gender differences with spreadsheet software. Our results showed gender differences in feature usage, feature-related confidence, and tinkering (playful exploration) with features. Then, drawing implications from these results, we designed and implemented features for our spreadsheet prototype that took the gender differences into account. The results of an evaluation on this prototype showed improvements for both males and females, and also decreased gender differences in some outcome measures, such as confidence. These results are encouraging, but also open new questions for investigation. We also discuss how our results compare to generalization studies performed with a variety of other software platforms and populations.

The life and times of files and information: a study of desktop provenance

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction, provenance refers to the history and genealogy of a document or file. Provenance helps us to understand the evolution and relationships of files; how and when different versions of a document were created, or how different documents in a collection build on each other through copy-paste events. Though methods for tracking provenance and the subsequent use of this meta-data have been proposed and developed into tools, there have been no studies documenting the types and frequency of provenance events in typical computer use. This is knowledge essential for the design of efficient query methods and information displays. We conducted a longitudinal study of knowledge workers at Intel Corporation tracking provenance events in their computer use. We also interviewed knowledge workers to determine the effectiveness of provenance cues for document recall. Our data shows that provenance relationships are common, and provenance cues aid recall.

A Debugging Perspective on End-User Mashup Programming

In recent years, systems have emerged that enable end users to “mash” together existing web services to build new web sites. However, little is known about how well end users succeed at building such mashups, or what they do if they do not succeed at their first attempt. To help fill this gap, we took a fresh look, from a debugging perspective, at the approaches of end users as they attempted to create mashups. Our results reveal the end users’ debugging strategies and strategy barriers, the gender differences between the debugging strategies males and females followed and the features they used, and finally how their debugging successes and difficulties interacted with their design behaviors.

Can feature design reduce the gender gap in end-user software development environments?

Recent research has begun to report that female end-user programmers are often more reluctant than males to employ features that are useful for testing and debugging. These earlier findings suggest that, unless such features can be changed in some appropriate way, there are likely to be important gender differences in end-user programmerspsila benefits from these features. In this paper, we compare end-user programmerspsila feature usage in an environment that supports end-user debugging, against an extension of the same environment with two features designed to help ameliorate the effects of low self-efficacy. Our results show ways in which these features affect female versus male enduser programmerspsila self-efficacy, attitudes, usage of testing and debugging features, and performance.

Principles of a debugging-first puzzle game for computing education

Although there are many systems designed to engage people in programming, few explicitly teach the subject, expecting learners to acquire the necessary skills on their own as they create programs from scratch. We present a principled approach to teach programming using a debugging game called Gidget, which was created using a unique set of seven design principles. A total of 44 teens played it via a lab study and two summer camps. Principle by principle, the results revealed strengths, problems, and open questions for the seven principles. Taken together, the results were very encouraging: learners were able to program with conditionals, loops, and other programming concepts after using the game for just 5 hours.

Explaining how to play real-time strategy games

Real-time strategy games share many aspects with real situations in domains such as battle planning, air traffic control, and emergency response team management which makes them appealing test-beds for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. End-user annotations could help to provide supplemental information for learning algorithms, especially when training data is sparse. This paper presents a formative study to uncover how experienced users explain game play in real-time strategy games. We report the results of our analysis of explanations and discuss their characteristics that could support the design of systems for use by experienced real-time strategy game users in specifying or annotating strategy-oriented behavior.

Idea Garden: Situated Support for Problem Solving by End-User Programmers

Although there have been many advances in end-user programming environments, recent empirical studies report that programming still remains difficult for end users. We hypothesize that one reason may be lack of effective support for helping end-user programmers problem-solve their own way around barriers they encounter. Therefore, in this paper, we describe the Idea Garden, a concept designed to help end-user programmers generate new ideas and problem-solve when they run into barriers. The Idea Garden has its roots in Minimalist Learning Theory and problem-solving theories. Our proof-of-concept prototype of the Idea Garden concept in the CoScripter end-user programming environment currently targets three barriers reported in end-user programming literature. It does so using an integrated, just-in-time combination of scaffolding for problem-solving strategies, for design patterns, and for programming concepts. Our empirical results showed that this approach helped enduser programmers overcome all three types of barriers our prototype targeted.

From barriers to learning in the idea garden: An empirical study

How can end-user programming environments better help their users overcome programming barriers? We have been investigating an approach called Idea Gardening, which addresses this problem by helping end users to help themselves overcome barriers in the context of “doing”. In this paper, we report on a qualitative empirical study of how effectively an Idea Garden prototype helped end users overcome programming barriers in the CoScripter environment, and the extent to which participants learned after interacting with our features. Our results showed that 9 out of 10 participants who encountered barriers and then used the Idea Garden, overcame their barriers. Further, all 9 went on to demonstrate evidence of having learned the programming concepts, patterns, and strategies relevant to overcoming these barriers.

End-user programmers in trouble: Can the Idea Garden help them to help themselves?

End-user programmers often get stuck because they do not know how to overcome their barriers. We have previously presented an approach called the Idea Garden, which makes minimalist, on-demand problem-solving support available to end-user programmers in trouble. Its goal is to encourage end users to help themselves learn how to overcome programming difficulties as they encounter them. In this paper, we investigate whether the Idea Garden approach helps end-user programmers problem-solve their programs on their own. We ran a statistical experiment with 123 end-user programmers. The experiments results showed that, even when the Idea Garden was no longer available, participants with little knowledge of programming who previously used the Idea Garden were able to produce higher-quality programs than those who had not used the Idea Garden.

End-user software engineering and distributed cognition

End-user programmers may not be aware of many software engineering practices that would add greater discipline to their efforts, and even if they are aware of them, these practices may seem too costly (in terms of time) to use. Without taking advantage of at least some of these practices, the software these end users create seems likely to continue to be less reliable than it could be. We are working on several ways of lowering both the perceived and actual costs of systematic software engineering practices, and on making their benefits more visible and immediate. Our approach is to leverage the users cognitive effort through the use of distributed cognition, in which the system and user collaboratively work systematically to reason about the program the end user is creating. This paper demonstrates this concept with a few of our past efforts, and then presents three of our current efforts in this direction.