This paper presents a pilot study on end-user programming by therapists of a tangible tool for children on the autism spectrum. The core design ideas were to use detailed natural language descriptions of states and events, and an incremental process to facilitate the programming task. Our study provides initial evidence of the feasibility of this approach.
This study aimed to shed new light on end-user programming by naïve users and -in particular- on
how users develop and assume appropriate mental models for programming tasks. Specifically, our
work was meant to investigate whether a proper representation of the task and the use of a concrete
representation of events and states may facilitate learning of an EUD tool. To this aim, we examined a
group of therapists while they were learning to program a tangible table to support individual exercises
for children on the autism spectrum. We used a thinking-aloud procedure [
End-User Development (EUD) is the possibility for naïve users to create and modify computer
applications [11]. EUD is a valuable approach to accommodate users' idiosyncratic needs and allow
both the expression of users’ creativity and the attribution of personal values and meanings to artifacts
[12]. When it comes to social therapy for children on the autism spectrum, these two aspects are tightly
interconnected. Indeed, it is well known that children on the autism spectrum have idiosyncratic and
strong dispositions that need to be taken into consideration by therapists for the success of the
intervention [8]. Various approaches have been used to support therapists for personalizing ICT-based
interventions while the use of EUD has been proposed [
In this study, we built upon the notion of Trigger-Action rules for controlling IoT devices [
In order to present a realistic example that could be also used in further longitudinal studies, in this pilot study we referred to the tabletop tangible tool described in Wierbiłowicz and colleagues [15]. This tool is an IoT device used to present interactive, multimedia, and tangible classification exercises. It has a circular surface (approximately 50 cm) carved with guides for the placement of the external pieces: objects and tiles representing different values of the objects' properties (see Figure 1). In the study by Wierbiłowicz and collaborators [15], this tool was used for classification exercises. This type of exercise starts when the therapist places an object in the center of the table. The child has to select the tiles that correspond to the specific values (e.g., “red”, “large”, “circular”) of the properties (e.g., color, size, shape) of this object. Once the tiles are placed in the guides, the table recognizes the objects and tiles through NFC tags and displays proper visual and acoustical feedback in case of either success or error. As discussed by the authors, the combination of digital and materiality has some interesting effects on sustained attention and empowerment of both the therapists and the children. In assessing their experience with the table, the therapists in Wierbiłowicz et al.’s study expressed the need to personalize the type and form of the feedback to adapt the exercises to any specific child.
In order to ground the EUD tasks, primitives for states and events were developed to reflect actual
configurations on the table and actions that users can perform on the table, respectively. The action
parts of the trigger-action rules are described as commands that can be given on the table to control
lights and sounds. To keep the task simple for non-programmers, we opted to avoid the use of variables
[13], while relying on lengthy and redundant descriptions of events and state (this should alleviate the
selection and the information barriers described by Ko and colleagues [9]). Natural language
descriptions have been demonstrated to be useful for programming task comprehension [
Four (4) volunteers (1 male, 3 females) were recruited for this pilot study. The inclusion criteria were work experience as a psychologist, therapist or educator in the context of cognitive, behavioral and social rehabilitation with children on the autism spectrum as well as no previous experience with programming. The study has been conducted remotely as semi-structured individual interviews. Each session was about 40 minutes and started with a brief demonstration of both the tangible tool and the EUD graphical interface. Each participant then was asked to perform three simple 1-rule tasks to familiarize with the system and with the think-aloud protocol. Finally, s/he had to create a new type of exercise for a classification game. Participants were instructed on the mechanics of the game while they have to create the rules using the available primitives. At the end of the study, participants were debriefed and asked about their comments, impressions, and possibly advices to improve the system. 2.1.
A managed to correctly define most of the rules. Participants B and C were able to correctly define almost all the rules. Participants A and B described each single configuration rather than using the more abstract state descriptions. Participants C was able to use oftentimes the more general (abstract) statements. Participant D was not able to correctly frame the problem with respect to the rules. Participant A always confused “while” and “when” conditions, but eventually he was able to correct himself most of the times by reading the rules’ summary. Indeed, the incremental rule creation through sequences of drop lists seemed for him to be more confusing than helpful while the final summary of the rules (which he read as a natural language statement) was much useful to recognize the mistakes. Instead, Participants B and C took advantage of the incremental construction of the interface. They almost “reasoned through the interface” rather than reasoning on the task before and then entering the rules into the interface. They too sometimes confused while with when but they were able to use these two conditions correctly while building the rule in the interface. Participant D used the strategy of thinking on the task before looking into the interface, similarly to participant A, and she too usually confused events with states, for example she complained when she could not find an event like “when all the tiles are inserted …”. Differently than participant A, she was not able to take advantage of the natural language descriptions.
Although very preliminary, our results are consistent with the insights from previous literature [
This work has been supported by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) under grant PRIN 2017 "EMPATHY: EMpowering People in deAling with internet of THings ecosYstems" (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale – Bando 2017, Grant 2017MX9T7H)
[8] C. Harrop, J. Amsbary, S. Towner-Wright, B. Reichow, and B. A. Boyd, That’s what I like: The use of circumscribed interests within interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. A systematic review, Res. Autism Spectr. Disord. 57 (2019) 63–86, doi: 10.1016/j.rasd.2018.09.008. [9] A. J. Ko, B. A. Myers, and H. H. Aung, Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems, in: Proceedings of 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing, Rome, 2004, pp. 199–206. doi: 10.1109/VLHCC.2004.47. [10] J. Korte et al., Pushing the Boundaries of Participatory Design, in: Proceedings of HumanComputer Interaction – INTERACT 2019, Paphos, Cyprus, Sep. 2019, pp. 747–753. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-29390-1_74. [11] H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, M. Klann, and V. Wulf, End-User Development: An Emerging Paradigm, in: H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, and V. Wulf (Eds.), End User Development, vol. 9, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006, pp. 1–8. doi: 10.1007/1-4020-5386-X_1 [12] P. Markopoulos, J. Nichols, F. Paternò, and V. Pipek, Editorial: End-User Development for the
Internet of Things, ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 24, (2017), 1–3, doi: 10.1145/3054765 [13] J. F. Pane, C. A. Ratanamahatana, and B. A. Myers, Studying the language and structure in nonprogrammers’ solutions to programming problems, Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 54 (2001) 237– 264, doi: 10.1006/ijhc.2000.0410. [14] F. Paternò and C. Santoro, End-user development for personalizing applications, things, and robots, Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 131 (2019) 120–130, doi: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.06.002. [15] J. Wierbiłowicz et al., Look at me and grab this! Materiality and the practices around negotiation of social attention with children on the autistic spectrum, in: Proceedings of the 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Shaping Experiences, Shaping Society, New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020, pp. 1–5, doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420176