PPIG 1998 - 10th Annual Workshop 5 - 7 Jan 1998, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

The tenth PPIG workshop was held at the Open University in the then rather windy town of Milton Keynes. A range of programming related topics were covered by the speakers, including software maintenance and reuse, program comprehension, imagery, syntonicity, tools for novices, programming paradigms and transfer. A list of the papers in shown below. The two invited speakers were Allen Cypher and Alexander Repenning.

Allen Cypher talked about CoCoa, a visual programming environment for children, and latest developments allowing the children to share their programs over the web. Allen described how CoCoa has been tested and refined over the years, through its use in schools.

Alexander Repenning talked of the challenges of end-user programming in a world were computer mediated communication is becoming ever more important.

Alex demonstrated Agentsheets, an agent-based spreadsheet environment, allowing people to create web-based interactive simulations. Both speakers gave enthralling talks and made full use of the technical facilities in the new cinema-style lecture theatre.

On the social side there was a pub meal, a traditional folk-style jam, plus the usual array of unusual prizes, and some birthday cake for those who made it to the end.

Contributors

An analysis of active and latent errors during object-oriented maintenance
C. R. Douce and P. J. Layzell

Software reuse from an external memory: the cognitive issues of support tools
Fabrice Retowsky

A coding scheme to analyze activities in technical review meetings
Patrick d’Astous, Françoise Détienne, Pierre N. Robillard and Willemien Visser

Invited talk: Programming for Children
Allen Cypher

Empirical studies of programmers using continuous display capturing
Marja-Riita Kivi and Tapio Grönfors

Expertise and error patterns in a programming task: An experiment on program comprehension with limited access windows
Simon P. Davies

Explaining programs: when talking to your mother can make you look smarter
Judith Good and Paul Brna

Visualization and imagery in teaching programming
Janne Markkanen, Pertti Saarilouma, Erkki Sutinen and Jorma Tarhio

A glimpse of expert programmers’ mental imagery
Marian Petre and Alan F. Blackwell

Syntonicity and the psychology of programming
Stuart Watt

Invited talk: Programming For The Rest Of Us: Lessons Learned From Programmers Who Do Not Want To Be Programmers
Alexander Repenning

A sensorial language for an autonomous agent
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano and Valerio Talarico

The software factory
Mordechai Ben-Ari

Pruning the tree of trees: The evaluation of notations for domain modeling
Mark Simos and Alan F. Blackwell

Supporting the learning of standard ML
Jon Whittle

HANK: A cognitive modelling language for psychology students
Paul Mulholland and Stuart Watt

Programming knowledge in ITS for learning functional programming
Nadezhda V. Gruzdeva

Programming paradigms and program comprehension by novices
Jan Erik Moström and David A. Carr

Modelling state in mind and machine
Meurig Beynon

Acquiring object technology concepts: the role of previous software development experience
Helen Sharp and Jacqui Griffyth