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Many modern end-user development environments support one of two visual modalities: block-based programming or data-flow programming. In this work, we investigate the trade-offs between the two modalities in the context of robotics tasks. These often contain both aspects that are better solved with blocks and others that best fit data-flow programming. To address this style of task, we present and discuss two novel programming environment prototypes, one purely block-based and one a hybrid of blocks and data-flow programming. We compare the designs through a controlled experiment with 113 end-user participants, in which we asked them to solve programming and program comprehension tasks using one of the two environments. We find that participants preferred the hybrid environment in direct comparison, but performed better across all tasks and also reported higher usability ratings for blocks.
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This content will become publicly available on September 27, 2026
Sculpin: Direct-Manipulation Transformation of JSON
Many end-user programming tasks require programmatically processing JSON, wrangling it from one format to another or building interactive applications atop it. But end-users are impeded by the indirectness and steep learning curve of textual code. We present Sculpin, a direct-manipulation environment supporting a broad range of JSON-transformation tasks. A user of Sculpin transforms JSON data step by step, recording a program in the process. Sculpin makes three design commitments to ensure directness and versatility: (1) steps are small and precise, not inferred; (2) steps are general-purpose and open to re-appropriation; (3) steps operate on JSON itself, rather than on a limited intermediate representation. To support these commitments, Sculpin introduces a mechanism of sculptable selections: the user can direct their action by guiding a selection on top of the data through small steps like generalization and hierarchical navigation. Sculpin also extends JSON with embedded interface elements like form inputs and buttons, allowing applications to be sculpted incrementally from source data. We demonstrate the breadth and directness of Sculpin in use-cases ranging from wrangling data to building applications. We evaluate Sculpin through a heuristic analysis, situating it in a broad space of programming systems and surfacing limitations such as difficulties editing preexisting programs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2432644
- PAR ID:
- 10656140
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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