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Nt1310 Section 2 Section 3

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Section III-A explains how the keyboard works while section III-B describes the main iterations that led to the keyboard’s final version. In section III-C, some of the user-interface design principles that helped to fine-tune the keyboard design are mentioned.
A. How Does It Work
The keyboard works like text entry keyboards, however, instead of inputting letters it inputs blocks. Each key inputs a block or changes a field. Version 3 in figure 1 shows the current layout of the keyboard. Once a block is inserted, the keyboard selects and highlights the first unoccupied input connector. The arrow keys allow navigating the blocks through their connectors by highlighting them. The keyboard’s keys will be enabled or disabled according to the highlighted …show more content…

Just like many keyboard designs that utilize the letter or word frequencies to layout their keys, we want to utilize the blocks’ frequencies. To accomplish this, we looked for Blockly programs sources. Code Studio, a website offering online courses created by Code.org, is used by millions of students [14]. It relies heavily on Blockly to teach programming concepts. Therefore, we choose it as a reference for Blockly programs. We counted the frequency of each block that was asked to be input in all the offered activities. However, if the activity asks the users to input less than 10 blocks we did not include that activity in the statistics. We chose not to include such activities because they have few blocks that do not represent a common block-base program. Commonly, an activity with few blocks just teaches how to input blocks rather than teaching programming concepts or problems solving. This left us with 47 Blockly programs from courses 2,3, and 4. We found that the average input task consists of 19 blocks. Table I shows the frequency of block types. The Code Studio activities did not ask the students to input all the block types in Blockly as can be noticed from the

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