Summary
Scratch is both a development environment and a block based programming language, which is a language that is broken up into blocks removing the need for one to memorize a syntax and instead allowing one to focus on the logic of the language (Scratch, 2017). Created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Scratch is meant to help children to begin learning how to program by dragging and dropping code blocks to form meaningful structures (2017). Myna runs parallel but separately from Scratch, so no information is shared between the two applications (Wagner et al, 2012). While this implementation does allow the ideas and concepts of Myna to be adapted and applied to other applications in general making the production of other VUIs possible, it does add some problems when attempting to achieve the full functionality of the underlying GUI application.
Zane’s work with Myna particularly involves Myna’s inability to scale with screen resolution leaving some components unreachable at resolutions other than the default 1366px x 768px resolution; to recognize, scroll, and track a scrollbar making some code blocks unreachable and long programs impossible; and to navigate dialogs and prompts created by Scratch making file retrieval not feasible.
Undergraduate Researcher
- Zane Johnston, Kennesaw State University, 2016-2017
Publications/Presentations
- Zane Johnston. One Size Doesn’t Fit All. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Student Research Competition. Seattle, WA, March 2017.
- Kennesaw State University’s Honor’s Capstone
Report
As part of a KSU Honor’s project, Zane produced a final report of his work.
Future Work
Future work would be related to Myna or, ideally, a combination of Myna and CodeBox64 to produce a multimodal input approach.