=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3053/sample-9col
|storemode=property
|title=Therapists as designers: an initial investigation of end-user programming of a tangible tool for therapeutic interventions
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3053/paper_8.pdf
|volume=Vol-3053
|authors=Margherita Andrao,Barbara Treccani,Massimo Zancanaro
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/interact/AndraoTZ21
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==Therapists as designers: an initial investigation of end-user programming of a tangible tool for therapeutic interventions==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3053/paper_8.pdf
Therapists as designers: an initial investigation of end-user
programming of a tangible tool for therapeutic interventions
Margherita Andrao 1,2, Barbara Treccani 1 and Massimo Zancanaro 1,2
1
Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Rovereto (Trento), Italy
2
Fondazione Bruno Kessler – FBK, Trento, Italy
Abstract
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.
Keywords 1
End-User Programming, End-User Development, Mental Models
1. Introduction
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 [2] to investigate therapists’
mental representations of how to program this tool.
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 [6] but not yet thoughtfully explored.
In this study, we built upon the notion of Trigger-Action rules for controlling IoT devices [1,14] and
leveraged on the idea of communicating a clear distinction between events and states [see 3,4] to
propose a language of primitives that therapists can use to personalize the exercises in a tangible device
[15].
1.1. The tangible tool and the events/state primitives
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
EMPATHY: Empowering People in Dealing with Internet of Things Ecosystems. Workshop co-located with INTERACT 2021, August 30,
2021, Bari, Italy
EMAIL: margherita.andrao@unitn.it (M. Andrao); barbara.treccani@unitn.it (B. Treccani); massimo.zancanaro@unitn.it (M. Zancanaro)
ORCID: 0000-0003-2245-9835 (M. Andrao); 0000-0001-8028-0708 (B. Treccani); 0000-0002-1554-5703 (M. Zancanaro)
©️ 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
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.
Figure 1: The tabletop tangible tool (left) with tiles and objects (middle), and a photo of a therapist
using the table with a child (left) from Wierbiłowicz and colleagues [15].
1.1.1. Primitive for states and events
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 [5], although
they might be confusing when the procedures need to be generated [7]. In an attempt to overcome this
problem, we employed a constrained interface that can guide the users in composing each rule by
progressively selecting the events and state for each rule (see Figure 2; the actual interface has been
inspired by the one proposed by Desolda and colleagues [3]). An example of a state description is
“[WHILE] at least 2 tiles in the lateral areas conform to the [properties of] the central object”. Similarly,
an example of an event is “[WHEN] an object is inserted in the central place”. An example of an action
with a contextual dependency (to avoid the use of a variable) is “switch off the light of the last tile
added to the table”. In total, 90 state descriptions, 684 event descriptions, and 368 action specifications
have been defined. The graphical user interface is designed to support the user in progressively build
the statements.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the interface used for the study. The central area contains the form to guide
the construction of the specifications of the Trigger-Action Rules. The lengthy verbose descriptions of
events and states make the rules look similar to natural language statements.
2. The study
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. Preliminary results
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.
3. Conclusion
Although very preliminary, our results are consistent with the insights from previous literature [5,7]
on the effectiveness of natural language descriptions on program’s comprehension. Furthermore, our
study suggests that an incremental interface may also help the users in the generation phase, but only if
they use the interface while reasoning on the task. Finally, it is worth noting that this approach may
effectively facilitate reasoning on concrete configurations (as done by participants B and C) but it does
not seem to help abstract reasoning. This might be a major weakness of the approach. Further studies
are needed to confirm the value of this approach and thoroughly investigate its pros and cons.
4. Acknowledgements
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)
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