Blocks&Beyond 2019: Blocks and Beyond 2019: Beyond Blocks The FedEx Institute of Technology (on the University of Memphis campus) Memphis, TN, United States, October 18, 2019 |
Conference website | http://cs.wellesley.edu/~blocks-and-beyond/2019/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=blocksbeyond2019 |
Abstract registration deadline | July 12, 2019 |
Submission deadline | July 19, 2019 |
Call for Participation
Blocks and Beyond 2019: Beyond Blocks
A VL/HCC workshop in Memphis, TN, USA, Fri Oct 18, 2019
Scope and Goals
Blocks programming has become increasingly popular in programming environments targeted at beginner programmers, end users, and casual programmers. Capitalizing on the energy and enthusiasm from the first two Blocks and Beyond workshops, we are pleased to announce the 2019 Blocks and Beyond workshop.
Since blocks are only a small step towards leveraging visual languages and notations for specifying and understanding computation, the emphasis of the 2019 workshop is on the Beyond aspect of Blocks & Beyond: what kinds of visual notations and programming environment scaffolding facilitate: Understanding program semantics? Learning computational concepts? Developing computational identity and fostering computational participation and computational action?
The goal of this workshop is to bring together language designers, educators, researchers, and members of the broader VL/HCC community to answer these questions. We seek participants with diverse expertise, including, but not limited to: design of programming environments, instruction with these environments, human factors, the learning sciences, and learning analytics.
This workshop will engage participants to (1) discuss the state of the art of visual languages targeted at beginners, end users, and casual programmers; (2) assess the usability and effectiveness of these languages and their associated pedagogies; and (3) brainstorm about future directions for these languages.
Suggested Topics for Discussion
- In what ways have blocks languages succeeded or failed at fulfilling the promise of visual languages to enhance the ability of humans to express computation?
- How can visual languages and environments better support dynamic semantics and pragmatics, particularly with features for liveness, debugging, and understanding the dynamic execution of programs?
- How usable and effective are visual environments for teaching computational thinking and programming? For democratizing programming and enabling computational participation and computational action? How do we know?
- In what ways does visual programming help or hinder those who use them as a stepping stone to traditional text-based languages? What are good ways to support the transition between visual languages and text-based languages? How important is this?
- How does the two-dimensional nature of visual language workspaces affect the way people create, modify, navigate, and search through their code?
- What tools are there for creating new visual languages, especially domain-specific ones?
- What are effective mechanisms for multiple people to collaborate on a visual programming when they (1) are co-located or (2) are working together remotely?
- What are effective pedagogical strategies to use with visual languages, both in traditional classroom settings and in informal and open-ended learning environments?
- What are the most effective ways to provide help to visual programmers, especially in settings outside the classroom?
- How can visual environments and associated curricular materials be made more accessible to everyone, especially those with visual and motor impairments and underrepresented populations in computing?
- What lessons from the visual programming community are worth sharing with other language designers? Are there features of visual languages that should be incorporated into IDEs for traditional programming environments? What features of modern IDEs are lacking in visual languages?
- How can online communities associated with these environments be leveraged to support users? Are these online communities inclusive and how can they be more inclusive?
- For these environments, what data can be collected, and how can that data be analyzed to determine answers to questions like those above? How can we use such data to answer larger scale questions about early experiences with programming?
Submission
We invite three kinds of paper submissions to spark discussion at the workshop:
- A 2 to 3 page position statement describing an idea, research question, or work in progress related to the design, teaching, or study of visual programming environments.
- A short paper (up to 4 pages, excluding references and/or acknowledgments) describing previously unpublished results involving the design, study, or pedagogy of visual programming.
- A long paper (up to 8 pages, excluding references and/or acknowledgments), with the same goals and content requirements of the short paper, but with a more substantial contribution.
Important Dates
- Fri 12 Jul 2019: Abstracts due (by end of day, anytime on Earth)
- Fri 19 Jul 2019: Paper submissions due (by end of day, anytime on Earth)
- Fri 09 Aug 2019: Author notification
- Fri 16 Aug -- Fri 20 Sep 2019: Rolling demo/poster abstract submissions
- Fri 16 Aug -- Fri 25 Oct 2019: Rolling demo/poster summary document submissions
- Mon 09 Sep 2019: Camera ready paper submissions and copyright forms due
- Fri 13 Sep 2019: Early registration for VL/HCC and B&B ends
- Fri 18 Oct 2019: Workshop in Memphis
- Fri 01 Nov 2019: Camera-ready demo/poster summary documents and copyright forms due