Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
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In exploring how to make programming easier for non-programmers,research into end-user environments hastraditionally been concerned with designing betterhuman-computer interaction. That traditional focus hasleft open the question of how end-user environmentsmight support human-human interaction. Especially insituations in which end-user environments are enlisted tofacilitate learning, we hypothesize that a key benefit maybe their ability to mediate conversations about a domainof interest. In what ways might end-user environmentssupport human communication, and what design featuresmake them well-suited to do so? Drawing onethnographic studies of an undergraduate algorithmscourse in which students constructed and presentedalgorithm visualizations, we develop a provisionalframework of six communicative dimensions of end-userenvironments: programming salience, typeset fidelity,story content, modifiability, controllability, andreferencability. To illustrate the design implications ofthese dimensions, we juxtapose conventional algorithmvisualization technology with a prototype end-userenvironment specifically designed to facilitatecommunication about algorithms. By characterizing thoseaspects of end-user environments that impact socialinteraction, our framework provides an importantextension to Green and Petre's [1] cognitive dimensions.