Flip: A concurrent bi-modal programming language for computational thinking

Flip项目的总体目标是探索一种新颖的方法，帮助年轻人学习如何编程，同时培养他们的计算思维能力。计算思维技能的概念是相当新的。尽管它来自计算机科学，但它描述了一系列日常生活中使用的技能：制定和执行计划；分类；从抽象而不是具体的角度思考等等。计算思维的重要性正在增加，它被认为是许多工作、职业和学术学科的重要组成部分。能够像计算机科学家一样思考，使得法律、生物学和艺术等领域取得了新的、有时是革命性的进步。尽管计算思维技能可能很重要，但关于如何支持它们的研究很少。此外，许多人在学习编程时遇到的困难导致了最近的一项举措，即在不教授编程的情况下教授计算思维，目前还不清楚这是不是一个积极的举措。Flip项目的目标是在游戏创作的背景下将编程和计算思维结合在一起。此前的研究表明，年轻人发现游戏的创作极具激励作用。年轻人愿意将游戏创作作为一种休闲活动，并将花费大量时间学习复杂的技能，包括交互式讲故事、创建引人注目的游戏序列以及创建和操纵多种形式的媒体，包括图形和声音。然而，在商业游戏创作环境中，年轻人发现最困难的活动之一是为了使他们的游戏具有互动性而需要的编程。这种环境中包含的编程语言不是为年轻人设计的，也不是为了支持人们学习编程而设计的。因此，我们建议设计一种编程语言，允许年轻人以两种方式创建简单的程序：使用文本输入，这类似于他们与他人谈论故事想法时自然表达的方式；使用图形输入，包括使用图标和颜色来突出程序中的计算结构。该语言将被整合到一个商业游戏创建工具包中，该工具包允许年轻人创建具有专业感觉的复杂角色扮演游戏，这本身就非常具有激励作用。该项目的第一阶段将与一群年轻人合作，以确定他们在创建游戏时如何自然地表达他们的故事想法。我们将使用这些信息来设计语言的文本部分，并将创建语言的连续复杂版本，在每个阶段从目标用户那里获得输入。我们还将与这些用户合作开发语言的图形组件，并收集他们对各种图形系统的易用性的意见，以帮助他们学习编程和发展计算思维技能。随后，我们将研究衡量计算思维技能的方法。虽然关于什么是计算技能的讨论很多，但关于如何衡量这些技能的讨论很少，这方面的工作需要制定有效的评估，这对这个项目和更广泛的领域都是有用的。最后，我们将在一项实证研究中测试这种语言，该研究旨在确定这种语言是否真的帮助年轻人发展第一，他们的编程技能，第二，相关的更高水平的计算思维技能。我们想要回答的其他问题是，图形和文本组件是否以不同的方式使用，和/或用于不同的任务。

The overall aim of the Flip project is to explore a novel way of helping young people learn how to program, while at the same time fostering their computational thinking skills. The concept of computational thinking skills is fairly recent. Although it comes from computer science, it describes a set of skills that are used in everyday life: making and carrying out a plan; sorting into categories; thinking in terms of the abstract rather than the concrete, etc. The importance of computational thinking is increasing, and it is recognised as an important part of many jobs, vocations and academic disciplines. Being able to think like a computer scientist has allowed for new, and sometimes revolutionary, advances in fields as diverse as law, biology, and the arts.As important as computational thinking skills may be, little research has been carried out on how to support them. Furthermore, the difficulties that many people experience when learning to program has led to a recent move to teach computational thinking without teaching programming, and it's not yet clear whether this is a positive move or not.The goal of the Flip project is to bring together programming and computational thinking within the context of game creation. Previous research suggests that young people find the creation of games to be highly motivating. Young people willingly engage in game creation as a leisure activity, and will spend many hours acquiring complex skills, including interactive storytelling, creating compelling game play sequences, and the creation and manipulation of multiple forms of media, including graphics and sound. However, one of the activities young people find most difficult in commercial game creation environments is the programming that is required in order to make their games interactive. The programming languages included in such environments were not designed for young people, nor were they designed to support people more generally as they learn to program. Therefore, we propose to design a programming language which will allow young people to create simple programs in two ways: using textual input, which is similar to the way they naturally express their story ideas when talking about them to others, and using graphical input, which includes the use of icons and colour to highlight the computational structures within the program. The language will be integrated within a commercial game creation toolkit which allows young people to create sophisticated role-playing games with a professional feel, which is in itself very motivating.The first stage of the project will be to work with a group of young people to determine how they naturally express their story ideas when creating a game. We will use this information in designing the textual component of the language, and will create successively sophisticated versions of the language, getting input from our target users at each stage. We will also work with these users to develop the graphical component of the language, and get their input on the ease of use of various graphical systems in helping them as they learn to program and develop computational thinking skills.Following this, we will look at ways of measuring computational thinking skills. Although there has been much talk of what computational skills are, there has been less discussion on how to measure these skills, and work is needed in this area to develop effective assessments, which will be of use both to this project, and more broadly.Finally, we will test the language in an empirical study designed to determine whether the language does in fact help young people to develop firstly, their programming skills and secondly, the associated higher level computational thinking skills. Additional questions we would like to answer are whether the graphical and textual components are used in different ways, and/or for different tasks.