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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. 

Programming industrial robots is difficult and expensive. Although recent work has made substantial progress in making it accessible to a wider range of users, it is often limited to simple programs and its usability remains untested in practice. In this article, we introduce Duplo, a block-based programming environment that allows end-users to program two-armed robots and solve tasks that require coordination. Duplo positions the program for each arm side-by-side, using the spatial relationship between blocks from each program to represent parallelism in a way that end-users can easily understand. This design was proposed by previous work, but not implemented or evaluated in a realistic programming setting. We performed a randomized experiment with 52 participants that evaluated Duplo on a complex programming task that contained several sub-tasks. We compared Duplo with RobotStudio Online YuMi, a commercial solution, and found that Duplo allowed participants to solve the same task faster and with greater success. By analyzing the information collected during our user study, we further identified factors that explain this performance difference, as well as remaining barriers, such as debugging issues and difficulties in interacting with the robot. This work represents another step towards allowing a wider audience of non-professionals to program, which might enable the broader deployment of robotics. 

Block-based programming, already popular in computer science education, has been successfully used to make programming accessible to end-users in applied domains such as the field of robotics. Most prior work in these domains has examined smaller programs that are usually simple and fit a single screen. However, real block-based programs often grow larger and, because end-users are unlikely to break them down into separate functions, they often become unwieldy. In our study, we introduce a function-centric block-based environment to help end-users write programs that require a large number of blocks. Through a user study with 92 users, we evaluated our approach and found that while users could successfully complete smaller tasks with and without our approach, they were both quicker and more successful with our function-centric method when tackling larger tasks. This work demonstrates that adding scaffolding can encourage the systematic use of functions, enabling end-users to write larger programs with block-based programming environments, which can contribute to the solution of more complex tasks in applied domains.