Usability of Programming Languages

Principal lecturer: Dr Alan Blackwell

Taken by: MPhil ACS

Syllabus

Lecture notes

Lecture slides



Assignments

In order to accommodate coursework within the short Easter term, the structure of the assignments as advertised in the syllabus has been modified as follows:

Assignment A (40%) - Background and experiment proposal: Friday 13 May

Assignment B (60%) - Full report with analysis and findings: Monday 6 June (9:00 am)



Current research resources

See the online proceedings of workshops of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group, and local copy of the proceedings of PPIG 2010 conference (29 MB file), which has not yet appeared on that site.

Review by Ko et al (2011) on the state of the art in end-user software engineering.

Call for papers for PPIG 2011.

Research with human participants

See Cambridge online guidance related to human participants in technology research.

Course text

J.-M. Hoc, T.R.G. Green, R. Samurçay and D.J. Gilmore (Eds) (1990).

Psychology of Programming.

Published by the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics and Academic Press.

Part 1 - Theoretical and Methodological Issues (introduction)

Part 2 Language Design and Acquisition of Programming (introduction)

Part 3 Expert Programming Skills and Job Aids (introduction)

Part 4 Broader Issues

Note on copyright: This book is currently not available in print. A selection of chapters has been provided, with the permission of the editors, for non-commercial educational and research use only. Members of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG) continue to conduct research as outlined here, and it is intended that specific chapters will be replaced with updated versions when individual authors are able to provide them. Volunteer assistance with OCR of these chapters, to assist those authors who no longer have their original manuscripts, would be appreciated.