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

Flip项目的总体目标是探索一种帮助年轻人学习编程的新方法，同时培养他们的计算思维能力。计算思维能力的概念是最近才出现的。虽然它来自计算机科学，但它描述了一套在日常生活中使用的技能：制定和执行计划；分类的：分门别类的；以抽象而非具体的方式思考，等等。计算思维的重要性正在增加，它被认为是许多工作、职业和学科的重要组成部分。能够像计算机科学家一样思考，在法律、生物和艺术等不同领域带来了新的、有时是革命性的进步。尽管计算思维能力可能很重要，但关于如何支持它们的研究却很少。此外，许多人在学习编程时遇到的困难导致了最近在不教编程的情况下教授计算思维的举措，目前尚不清楚这是否是一个积极的举措。Flip项目的目标是将编程和计算思维结合到游戏创作中。之前的研究表明，年轻人发现游戏创作具有很强的激励作用。年轻人愿意将游戏创作作为一种休闲活动，并愿意花大量时间学习复杂的技能，包括互动故事叙述，创造引人入胜的游戏玩法序列，以及创造和操纵多种形式的媒体，包括图像和声音。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使他们的游戏具有互动性所需的编程。这些环境中包含的编程语言并不是为年轻人设计的，也不是为更广泛地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，类似于他们在与他人交谈时自然表达故事想法的方式；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。这门语言将被整合到一个商业游戏创作工具包中，让年轻人能够创造出具有专业感觉的复杂角色扮演游戏，这本身就很有激励作用。项目的第一阶段将是与一群年轻人合作，确定他们在制作游戏时如何自然地表达自己的故事想法。我们将在设计语言的文本组件时使用这些信息，并将创建语言的连续复杂版本，在每个阶段从目标用户处获取输入。我们还将与这些用户一起开发该语言的图形组件，并就各种图形系统的易用性获取他们的意见，以帮助他们学习编程和发展计算思维技能。接下来，我们将看看衡量计算思维能力的方法。尽管有很多关于什么是计算技能的讨论，但关于如何衡量这些技能的讨论却很少，并且需要在这一领域开展有效的评估，这将对本项目以及更广泛的项目都有帮助。最后，我们将在一项实证研究中测试这门语言，旨在确定这门语言是否确实有助于年轻人发展，首先是他们的编程技能，其次是相关的更高水平的计算思维技能。我们想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.