Paper Reading #25 - A Code Reuse Interface for Non-Programmer Middle School Students

Comments
Cindy Skach
Joshua Penick

Reference Information
Paul A. Gross, Micah S. Herstand, Jordana W. Hodges, Caitlin L. Kelleher, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary
The program in question here is one that would like to aid middle school students in finding features of a program they use and wanting to capture those features. This is done by recording the feature in question which then finds the appropriate code section and then the student can copy it over for use in their own program. An actual example of this would be the student trying to make an animation where the student wants a certain character to jump and kick a door. The student knows that this happened in a similar animation and then can use this code reuse program in order to extract that action for their own use. The code is extracted in what they call ActionScripts which are then played through until the student finds the exact action that they want.

Discussion
The objective behind these authors' motives is quite a good one. They are trying to get young people interested in coding and computer science at a time when they would be able to create an interest. As the computer science industry has a very lopsided ratio of genders currently, they are trying to get more interest generated in order to even that out. This program is actually a really important device for young people because I think that the biggest pitfall in teaching coding is the initial hump that people must get over in order to really get started. When the student looks at code, they cannot understand or find what they are looking for, but this program will help them ease into it and find more interest in computer science.