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One approach to teaching game design to students with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds is through team game projects that span multiple weeks, up to an entire term. However, open-ended, creative projects introduce a gamut of challenges to novice programmers. Our goal is to assist game design students with the planning stage of their projects. This paper describes our data collection process through three course interventions and student interviews, and subsequent analysis in which we learned students had difficulty expressing their creative vision and connecting the game mechanics to the intended player experience. We present these results as a step towards the goal of scaffolding the planning process for student game projects, supporting more creative ideas, clearer communication among team members, and a stronger understanding of human-centered design in software development. 

Systems understanding is a skill required to solve many of the world’s most important problems, from climate change to immunotherapy to social decision-making. However, these problems also require communication among experts with diverse skill sets and academic backgrounds. Our long-term goal is to facilitate systems understanding across a range of disciplines through end-user computational modeling tools. This paper presents the Ceptre Editor, a structure editor for the rule-based programming language Ceptre. The Ceptre Editor runs in the browser and offers a visual interface and integrated development environment for Ceptre, following design recommendations from end-user programming, with the goal of providing discoverable affordances for program construction and maintaining syntactic well-formedness at each edit state. We performed a preliminary evaluation of the tool through a qualitative study, assessing the editors effectiveness at helping users understand and extended a system model, and found promising results regarding learnability and mental model accuracy.