Blocks? Graphs? Why Not Both? Designing and Evaluating a Hybrid Programming Environment for End-users
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many modern end-user development environments support one of two visual modalities: block-based programming or data-flow programming. In this work, we investigate the trade-offs between the two modalities in the context of robotics tasks. These often contain both aspects that are better solved with blocks and others that best fit data-flow programming. To address this style of task, we present and discuss two novel programming environment prototypes, one purely block-based and one a hybrid of blocks and data-flow programming. We compare the designs through a controlled experiment with 113 end-user participants, in which we asked them to solve programming and program comprehension tasks using one of the two environments. We find that participants preferred the hybrid environment in direct comparison, but performed better across all tasks and also reported higher usability ratings for blocks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it