"SoD-HCER: Contextualized Design Education for Professionals from Non-Computing Disciplines"
The focus of this project is on end-user programmers. End-user software developers are people who are design and implement software but who have not been formally trained to engage in this activity. This is a large population (estimated between 55 and 90 million people) whose activities range from coding in programming or scripting languages in order to extend the capabilities of a tool, to writing macros for widely used office products or developing web materials. Some of the questions addressed in the project are: "What do local developers know about design? What should local developers learn about design? How can we teach them about design? What do they understand about data structures, structured programming, or structured processes? If there is a documented lack of design knowledge, what is its impact on their artifacts? The goals of the project are: to investigate what design knowledge local developers value and how they seek out this knowledge; to explore the mechanism of a collaborative case-based design aid to support an existing community of local developers; to explore embedding design education into the local developer's application and to measure the amount of design learning that results. The overall research goal is to develop guidelines for software developers whose users may become end-user programmers and even local developers. The projects success will mean the industry will gain increased knowledge about design practices engaged in by end-users. That knowledge may lead to more effective support structures and education for this class of developers. There are a lot of such people, distributed across a wide range of professions, so impacts may affect many organizations. In addition, insights gained about the population being studied may impact computer science theory and education and the science of design on a wide population of computer users. Another outcome of this research is guidance on how to provide support for task-based learning for end-user programmers. The potential impact of research is far reaching--it could pave the way for introducing techniques for supporting end-user programming into commercial products.
Program Manager: Anita J. La Salle Date: June 27, 2006
