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Rethinking children's programming with contextual signs

Published: 07 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We present an approach to children's programming inspired by the semiotics of comics. The idea is to build computer programs in a direct and concrete way by using a class of signs that we call contextual signs. There are two aspects that distinguish contextual signs from other sign systems used for programming. The first is that the signs are displayed in the immediate visual context of the object that they refer to. The second is that the signs are used to illustrate actions and properties in a way that is directly perceivable by the user. We argue that these two properties make contextual signs a promising high-level approach for building systems that are rich in dynamic properties, such as the ones that children often like to build.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Visual programming with analogical representationsJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2007.01.00218:2(99-125)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2018
  • (2009)Comics, robots, fashion and programmingProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction10.1145/1517664.1517669(3-8)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2009
  • (2008)V-ToysProceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (c5 2008)10.1109/C5.2008.22(165-171)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2008
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IDC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Interaction design and children
June 2006
172 pages
ISBN:9781450378086
DOI:10.1145/1139073
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 June 2006

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Author Tags

  1. children
  2. comics
  3. semiotics
  4. tangible programming
  5. visual programming

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Visual programming with analogical representationsJournal of Visual Languages and Computing10.1016/j.jvlc.2007.01.00218:2(99-125)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2018
  • (2009)Comics, robots, fashion and programmingProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction10.1145/1517664.1517669(3-8)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2009
  • (2008)V-ToysProceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (c5 2008)10.1109/C5.2008.22(165-171)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2008
  • (2007)How preschool children used a behaviour-based programming toolProceedings of the 6th international conference on Interaction design and children10.1145/1297277.1297308(149-152)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2007
  • (2007)Storytelling alice motivates middle school girls to learn computer programmingProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1240624.1240844(1455-1464)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2007

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