A visual programming environment for authoring ASD therapy tools

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: 3D virtual environments can be used as therapy tools in patients with autism spectrumdisorders (ASDs); however, the development of such tools is time-consuming.A 3D virtual environment development platform for such tools has been developedspecifically for the South African context, because of the language and culturesensitivity of these therapy tools.The 3D virtual environment development platform has a Lua scripting interfacefor specifying logic in the virtual environments. Lua is a textual programminglanguage, and presents a challenge to ASDs therapists' ability to create therapytools without engaging an expert programmer.The aim of this research was to investigate the design and implementation of avisual programming environment to support non-expert programmers in scriptingwithin the 3D virtual environment development platform.Various visual program representation techniques, reported in the literature, wereexamined to determine their appropriateness for adoption in our design. A visualprogramming language based on the 'building-block approach was considered themost suitable. The research resulted in the development of a visual script editor(VSE), based on an open source framework called the OpenBlocks library.The VSE successfully alleviated the syntax burden that textual programming languagesplace on non-expert programmers. The fitness of purpose of our VSE wasexemplified in a sample 3D virtual environment that was scripted using the VSE.Despite the success, we argue that the applicability of the 'building-block approachis limited to domain-specific programming languages due to the absence ofvisual expressions for defining user-defined types, and for specifying hierarchy.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University