Visual Programming Challenge

Allen L. Ambler

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The University of Kansas

CONTACT INFORMATION

415 Snow Hall
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045
Phone: (913) 864-7385
Fax : (913) 864-3226
Email: ambler@eecs.ukans.edu

WWW PAGE

http://www.designlab.ukans.edu/~ambler

PROGRAM AREA

Virtual Environments.

KEYWORDS

visual programming; visual programming challenge; public programming; visual rule-based programming; visual dataflow programming; visual form-based programming; visual programming environments.

PROJECT SUMMARY

The objective of the Visual Programming Challenge (VPC) is to focus the various visual programming approaches, both research and commercial, on a specific problem as a means of providing a comparative analysis. The competition domain is a problem involving quasi-real-time control of a robotic vehicle. The control of these robotic vehicles is representative of programmable control problems that might reasonably be encountered by the general public in years ahead. For instance, programming a robotic vehicle is similar to what might be required to program a robotic vacuum cleaner.

The VPC is a two part competition. The first part required submission of a visual program solving a particular problem. The second part will be conducted live in conjunction with the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, in Capri, Italy from September 24-26, 1997. The first part was open to all competitors and is not completed. The second part is by invitation only, based on performance in the first part.

PROJECT REFERENCES

A. Ambler, "1997 Visual Programming Challenge Announcement", http://www.designlab.ukans.edu/~ambler/vpc.html.

A. Ambler, T. Green, T.D. Kimura, A. Repenning, and T. Smedley, "1997 Visual Programming Challenge Summary", 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Capri, Italy, 1997.

P. T. Cox, T. J. Smedley, J. Garden, and M. McManus, "Experiences with Visual Programming in a Specific Domain - Visual Language Challenge '96," 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Capri, Italy, 1997.

J. J. Pfeiffer, "A Rule-Based Visual Language for Small Mobile Robots," 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Capri, Italy, 1997.

AREA BACKGROUND

For years the visual programming research community has sought ways to improve the programming processes by applying visual technologies. Approaches vary as to how such an effective improvement should be obtained. Some researchers try to facilitate the comprehension of conventional programming paradigms by using visual representations. Other researchers use different programming paradigms that exploit aspects of visual representation. For instance, dataflow programming requires a representation that does not overly constrain evaluation ordering, or even appear to imply constraints that do not really exist. Control flow structure for dataflow programs can be an arbitrary directed graph rather than a hierarchical graph. As such, while possible to express in a textual representation, a visual representation may be more effective. For specific results of visual programming research, browse the issues of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing published by Academic Press.

A common theme in visual programming research is that visual, and indeed other forms of human-computer communication, influence language design and indirectly determine "who is able to program what". In particular, the programmer and his/her ability to program are intimately tied up in the language in which they must express themselves. Consequently, the features and concepts of a language not only effect what the language can be used for, but also who can use it. By appropriate concept and feature choices and representations it is believed possible to create a language that has both wide utility and minimum pedagogical impediments.

Wide utility and few pedagogical impediments are not necessarily synergistic goals, thus a plethora of approaches are conceivable. On the one hand, conventional languages such as C or C++ have broad utility, but are extremely hard to learn; while on the other hand, a spreadsheet is usable by many people who have had little formal programming training, but spreadsheets have limited applicability.

This challenge is meant to put various programming language approaches on comparative grounds, both in terms of utility and pedagogical impediments. The challenge rules leave open where the line should be drawn between breadth of utility and ease of learning and use. In particular, they do not specifically state who is the target user. However, all other things being equal, pedagogical issues will be given priority over breadth of utility.

AREA REFERENCES

M. M. Burnett and A. Ambler, "An Interactive Approach to Visual Data Abstraction for Declarative Visual Programming Languages", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, (March 1994), 29-60.

P. T. Cox and T. Pietrzykowski, "Using a Pictorial Representation to Combine Dataflow and Object-Orientation in a Language Independent Programming Mechanism," Proceedings of the International Computer Science Conference, 1988, pp. 695-704.

P. T. Cox, F. R. Giles, and T. Pietrzykowski, "Prograph: A Step towards Liberating Programming from Textual Conditioning," 1989 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, Rome, 1989, pp. 150-156.

D. S. Dyer, "A Dataflow Toolkit for Visualization," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 10 (6), 1990, pp. 60-69.

R. Haber, B. Bliss, D. Jablonowski, and C. Jog, "A Distributed Environment for Run-Time Visualization and Application Steering in Computational Mechanics," Symposium on High-Performance Computing for Flight Vehicles, Washington DC, 1992.

T. D. Kimura, J. W. Choi, and J. M. Mack, "Show and Tell: A Visual Programming Language," Visual Computing Environments, E. P. Glinert (ed.), IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990, pp. 397-404.

T. D. Kimura, "Hyperflow: A Visual Programming Language for Pen Computers" 1992 IEEE Workshop on Visual Languages, Seattle, 1992, pp. 125-132.

J. Leopold and A. Ambler, "Keyboardless Visual Programming Using Voice Using Voice, Handwriting, and Gesture," 1997 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Capri, Italy, 1997.

B. Lucas, "Architecture for a Scientific Visualization System," Proceedings of Visualization '92, Boston, 1992.

T. Pietrzykowski, S. Matwin, and T. Muldner, "The Programming Language PROGRAPH: Yet Another Application of Graphics" Graphics Interface '83, Edmonton, Alberta, 1983, pp. 143-145.

John R. Rasure and Carla S. Williams, "An Integrated Data Flow Visual Langauge and Software Development Environment," Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 2 (3), 1991, pp. 217-246.

A. Repenning and T. Sumner, "Agentsheets: A Medium for Creating Domain-Oriented Visual Languages," Computer, vol. 28, 1995, pp. 17-25.

D. Smith et al. "KidSim: Programming Agents Without a Programming Language," Communications of the ACM, Vol.37, No. 7, July 1994.

A. Tuchman, D. Jablonowski, G Cybenko, "Run-time Visualization of Program Data," Proceedings of Visualization '91, San Diego, 1991.

C. Upson, T. Faulhaber, Jr., D. Kumins, D. Laidlaw, D. Schlegel, J. Vroom, R. Gurwitz, A. van Dam, "The Application Visualization System," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 9 (4), 1989, pp. 30-42.

G. Viehstaedt and A. Ambler, "Visual Representation and Manipulation of Matrices," Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (September 1992), pp. 273-298.

G. Wang and A. Ambler, "Solving Display-Based Problems", 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Denver, (September 1996), 122-129.

RELATED PROGRAM AREAS

(3) Other Communication Modalities
(5) Usability and User-Centered Design