HCC: Large: Collaborative Research: Variations to Support Exploratory Programming

在任何设计或学习活动中，探索都是一个关键组成部分。重大研究和传统智慧表明，实现高质量设计的最好方法是探索多种变体并反复评估它们。当新手学习一项新技能或系统时，他们必须探索和练习可用的选项。同样，当专家试图理解和改进现有设计时，他们必须探索不同的方法来修改其行为。不幸的是，使用今天的工具进行探索是有风险的、容易出错的，并且很麻烦。例如，当用户确定他们当前的设计无效时，可用于选择性回溯更改的唯一机制是线性撤消和版本控制，这使得很难将回溯隔离到特定编辑，否则用户必须手动删除不需要的编辑，这既慢又容易出错。此外，今天的工具不支持比较设计的两个变体或组合来自多个变体的元素。研究表明，这些人工过程抑制了探索，使用户和设计效率降低。为了解决这些问题，来自四个合作机构的PI联合起来进行了一项既广泛又深入的研究计划，重点是在系统的实施和发展过程中创造和管理变化。目标是发现支持代码变化的新理论、算法、可视化和工具。该团队将通过实验室和实地研究评估他们的所有方法，并将调查如何以更有效的方式教育用户使用变体。基于表示软件变体的选择演算，他们将开发一种形式化定义和推理变体的理论。他们将利用人类行为理论，如极简主义学习、注意力投资和信息搜寻，来发展变异搜寻理论。他们将开发一个基础设施，包括用户编辑操作的多个级别的抄本，该基础设施将支持一种新的选择性撤消形式，并使用户能够调查其现有变体，返回到任何以前的变体，并混合和匹配来自多个变体的元素。他们将开发算法来记录与变体的交互，以便可以探索和重复使用这些算法来探索和测试新的变体；这些记录将使用自动创建的数据来增强，以帮助用户了解他们没有明确探索的行为。使用这一基础设施，PI将发明可视化、搜索工具和交互技术，为用户提供有效的方法来查找、理解、探索、重复使用和创建变体，并能够询问“为什么”问题来理解系统变体之间的差异。对于新手来说，“创意花园”将帮助他们探索新的策略，以确定哪些变体可以帮助解决问题以及如何实施它们。博主影响：这项研究将通过创建一个集成的、开源的网络开发环境来增强研究和教育的基础设施，供研究人员和世界使用。因此，这项工作将使数千万最终用户程序员能够创造性地为网络构建内容和应用程序，从而造福社会。PIs将通过将他们的研究整合到关于创造力和软件工程的本科课程中，并支持每年至少300名高中生参加夏令营，在促进学习的同时促进发现。项目成果将通过出版物和演示文稿向研究人员传播，通过上述营地和国家女童合作项目以及通过公共部署向计算机教育工作者传播。PI预计会有很高的兴趣，因为这项工作将基于JavaScript，这是当今最流行的编程语言，对更好的工具有很高的需求。这项研究将通过重点调查如何支持男性和女性最终用户程序员，通过让代表不足群体的高中成员参与，并通过接触许多PI来解决代表性不足问题？女学生。

In any design or learning activity, exploration is a key component. Significant research and conventional wisdom show that the best way to achieve a high-quality design is to explore multiple variations and iteratively evaluate them. When novices learn a new skill or system, they must explore and practice the available options. Similarly, when experts try to understand and improve an existing design, they must explore different approaches to modifying its behavior. Unfortunately, exploration is risky, error-prone, and cumbersome using today's tools. For instance, when users decide their current design is not effective, the only mechanisms available for selectively backtracking out of changes are linear undo and version control, which make it difficult to isolate backtracking to specific edits, or else users must manually remove undesired edits, which is slow and fallible. Further, today's tools do not support comparing two variants of a design or combining elements from multiple variants. Research is showing that these manual processes inhibit exploration, making users and designs less effective.To address these problems PIs from four partner institutions have come together to undertake a research program that is both broad and deep, focusing on the creation and management of variations during a system's implementation and evolution. The goal is to discover new theories, algorithms, visualizations, and tools that support variations in code. The team will evaluate all of their approaches through lab and field studies, and they will investigate how users can be educated in more effective ways to work with variations. Based on a choice calculus for representing variations in software, they will develop a theory for formally defining and reasoning about variations. They will leverage theories of human behavior such as Minimalist Learning, Attention Investment, and Information Foraging, to develop a theory of Variation Foraging. They will develop an infrastructure including multiple levels of transcripts of users' editing operations that will support a novel form of selective undo and enable users to investigate their existing variants, return to any previous variant, and mix and match elements from multiple variants. They will develop algorithms to enable recording of interactions with variants so they can be explored and reused to explore and test new variants; these recordings will be augmented with automatically created data to help users understand behaviors they have not explicitly explored. Using this infrastructure the PIs will invent visualizations, search facilities, and interaction techniques that provide effective ways for users to find, understand, explore, reuse and create variants, and be able to ask "why" questions to understand the differences among variations of a system. For novices, an "Idea Garden" will help them explore new strategies for identifying which variations can help solve a problem and how to implement them.Broader Impacts: This research will enhance infrastructure for research and education by producing an integrated, open source web development environment for use by researchers and the world. The work will therefore benefit society by empowering the tens of millions of end-user programmers to creatively build content and applications for the web. The PIs will advance discovery while promoting learning by integrating their research into undergraduate courses on creativity and software engineering, and by supporting summer camps for at least 300 high school students per year. Project outcomes will be disseminated to researchers through publications and presentations, to computing educators through the above-mentioned camps and the National Girls Collaborative Project, and through public deployment. The PIs expect high interest because the work will be based on JavaScript, which is today's most popular programming language and for which there is a high demand for better tools. The research will address underrepresentation via its focus on investigating how to support both male and female end-user programmers, by involving high-school members of underrepresented groups, and by engaging many of the PIs? female students.