AgentSheets

Abstract: End-user game design tools are effective in motivating and exposing students with no prior programming experience to computer science. However, while there is good evidence that these environments are effective motivators, the question remains what do students actually learn? For our purposes, using AgentSheets, we would like to know if students can apply the knowledge obtained from programming games to creating science simulations. Specifically, we want to better understand if students are able to recognize Computational Thinking Patterns (CTP) from their game programming experience. Computational Thinking Patterns are abstract programming patterns that enable agent interactions not only in games but also in science simulations. Students and teachers who participated in a game design summer institute were administered a Computational Thinking Pattern Quiz (CTP Quiz). This quiz tested the participants' ability to recognize and understand patterns in a context removed from game programming. We found that participants, for the most part, were able to understand and recognize the patterns in a variety of contexts

Abstract: Cultures deal with their environments by adapting to them and simultaneously changing them. This is particularly true for technological cultures, such as the dynamic culture of computer users. To date, the ability to change computing environments in non-trivial ways has been dependent upon the skill of programming. Because this skill has been hard to acquire, most computer users must adapt to computing environments created by a small number of programmers. In response to the scarcity of programming ability, the computer science community has concentrated on producing general-purpose tools that cover wide spectrums of applications. As a result, contemporary programming languages largely ignore the intricacies arising from complex interactions between different people solving concrete problems in specific domains. This dissertation describes Agentsheets, a substrate for building domain-oriented, visual, dynamic programming environments that do not require traditional programming skills. It discusses how Agentsheets supports the relationship among people, tools, and problems in the context of four central themes: (1) Agentsheets features a versatile construction paradigm to build dynamic, visual environments for a wide range of problem domains such as art, artificial life, distributed artificial intelligence, education, environmental design, and computer science theory. The construction paradigm consists of a large number of autonomous, communicating agents organized in a grid, called the agentsheet. Agents utilize different communication modalities such as animation, sound, and speech. (2) The construction paradigm supports the perception of programming as problem solving by incorporating mechanisms to incrementally create and modify spatial and temporal representations. (3) To interact with a large number of autonomous entities Agentsheets postulates participatory theater, a human-computer interaction scheme combining the advantages of direct manipulation and delegation into a continuous spectrum of control and effort. (4) Metaphors serve as mediators between problem solving-oriented construction paradigms and domain-oriented applications. Metaphors are used to represent application semantics by helping people to conceptualize problems in terms of concrete notions. Furthermore, metaphors can simplify the implementation of applications. Application designers can explore and reuse existing applications that include similar metaphors.

Abstract: Visual programming systems are supposed to simplify programming by capitalizing on innate human spatial reasoning skills. I argue that: (i) good visual programming environments should be oriented toward their application domains, and (ii) tools to build domain-oriented environments are needed because building such environments from scratch is very difficult. The demonstration illustrates how the visual programming system builder called Agentsheets addresses these issues and demonstrates several applications built using Agentsheets.

Abstract: Customized visual representations enable end users to achieve their programming goals. Here, designers work with users to tailor visual programming languages to specific problem domains. We describe a design methodology and a tool for creating domain oriented, end user programming languages that effectively use visualization. We first describe a collaborative design methodology involving end users and designers. We then present Agentsheets, a tool for creating domain oriented visual programming languages, and illustrate how it supports collaborative design by examining experiences from a real language design project. Finally, we summarize the contributions of our approach and discuss its viability in industrial design projects. >