Research Questions

Research Questions

The GP project is exploring a number of research questions.

One set of questions revolves around the potential target audiences for GP and whether GP can address their needs. While the GP firmly believes that there is a vast yet largely unrecognized need for a programming language for people who are not primarily programmers, that is only a working assumption at this point. We don’t yet know which professional fields have the greatest need for GP, what those needs are, or how to get busy professionals in those fields to try a new programming language.

Similarly, it’s not yet clear how many adults have the time and motivation to learn programming to support their outside-of-work activities. We are encouraged by the fact that Apple’s Hypercard was used by many adults who had not previously programmed.

We are more confident that GP could be used in education, perhaps at the high-school or college level.

Another set of questions revolve around the learning curve for GP. Our hope is that it will be easy to simple things in GP right away and possible to do more complex things as the user grows in experience. We’d like GP to enable users to improve their knowledge and programming skills incrementally, discovering new commands, techniques, and concepts such as classes as they need them. How can we design GP to support and motivate incremental learning and just-in-time discovery? Can users discover computational concepts such as iteration, variables, data structures, and classes simply by exploring GP examples, or do some of those concepts require a more formal, “text book style” presentation?