Leveraging teenagers feedback in the development of a domain-specific language

Ankica Barisic (1) , Cambeiro João (2) , Vasco Amaral (2) , Miguel Goulão (1) , Mota Tarquínio (3)

1 NOVA-LINCS - NOVA Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics
2 NOVA - Universidade Nova de Lisboa = NOVA University Lisbon
3 Artica

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) empower end-users to express software tasks that were traditionally developed by software engineers. DSLs allow users to express themselves in terms closer to the way they think about their problems, rather than in computational terms. However, conceiving a DSL with an adequate user experience for its end-users is not a trivial task, and the process of engineering that adequacy tends to be performed ad-hoc. The Gyro Creator Language (GCL) is an open-source DSL for controlling low-cost rover-like Arduino robots, designed for being used by teenagers with no previous computing skills, so they can be introduced to programming in a fun way. In this paper, we discuss an iterative process building on teenagers' early feedback, collected in a series of empirical evaluations with 128 teenagers, and how this has helped us driving GCL to a competitive level in terms of usability, when compared to well-established alternatives such as Lego, or Scratch.

Mots clés: • Software and its engineering → Software usability; Domain specific languages; Visual languages; Programming languages for children; Robotics Programming

Domaines: Sciences cognitives; Informatique

Ankica Barisic, Cambeiro João, Vasco Amaral, Miguel Goulão, Mota Tarquínio. Leveraging teenagers feedback in the development of a domain-specific language. SAC 2018: Symposium on Applied Computing, 2018, Pau France, France. pp.1221-1229, ⟨10.1145/3167132.3167264⟩. ⟨hal-03159963⟩