Paper Reading # 25

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Reference
A code Reuse Interface for Non-Programmer Middle School Students
Paul A. Gross, Micah S. Herstand, Jordana W. Hodges, Caitlin L. Kelleher
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about a programming tool for middle school students with no programming experience to reuse code functionality. The authors believe that middle school is a very important learning stage where students usually determine if they will pursue math and science related careers in the future. It is extremely rare that schools offer courses in Computer Science in this stage of education. In order to try to awake more interest in Computer Science, they developed a programming tool that is integrated with a program called Looking Glass. The process of this tool is the following: users will find the code that corresponds to the desired functionality, users will then extract this code which will be called Actionscript, and finally users will integrate this code into a new program. The main goal is to allow middle school students to reuse snippets of code without them fully understanding how all of the code works. In order to facilitate this process, the code navigation is based on an observable output display. Look Glass is based on story telling and is designed to create animation stories.  An experiment was conducted on an Exxon Mobil Summer Science Camp. At the end of the session, the students participated in a quiz where they were asked to identify the best description of code snippets. According to their results, about 98% of the participants were able to capture and reuse Actionscripts.

Discussion
How awesome would it have been if I had been exposed to something similar to this? My first experience with computer programming was in my second semester in college. I truly believe that programs like this could really attract more people to Computer Engineering/Science. It is a very interesting approach and there should be more of these programs trying to teach middle school students about future opportunities. Even though this experiment was triggering students to become more familiar with Computer Science, it could work with any other subjects as well.