Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

 

Scratch Explorer : a tool for assisting end-user program comprehension of animation scripts 公开 Deposited

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/8p58pg25g

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  • Visual programming languages (VPLs) have been widely used to support end-user programming. However, end users are still not able to reuse code as actively as professional programmers, even when given abundant resources such as a large VPL program repository. One reason may be that current VPL development environments lack features supporting efficient code exploration and program comprehension, thus cannot alleviate the hard mental operations during code reuse. To investigate into the problem of end-user program comprehension, this thesis focuses on an animation scripting language Scratch and presents tool features for assisting novice end users' understanding of animation scripts. For evaluating these features, we built Scratch Explorer, a code exploration environment containing visualized program information. Our empirical study has shown that Scratch Explorer has significantly helped novice Scratch users to answer code comprehension questions: less time and effort are required for them to find the target information. More specifically, Scratch Explorer users' understanding of control flow and data flow has exceeded those using the traditional tool, implying that Scratch Explorer may help novice users successfully build a mental model of the program. These empirical results demonstrate that effective program visualization has significant advantages over conventional visual program displaying techniques in assisting end-user program comprehension, and can be embedded as features into end-user animation environments.
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