Creative Coding is characterized by iterative and exploratory workflows oriented toward open-ended outcomes. Practitioners make small adjustments to parameter values and code structure, where even minor edits can produce drastically different visual results. Yet existing tools offer limited means for tracking this process, and creative coders rely on time-consuming strategies to save, inspect, compare, and revisit prior versions. More importantly, this is not only a practical limitation but also a conceptual mismatch: the tools used to manage versions can shape and potentially constrain the creative process itself. This article derives design considerations and presents Reframe, a web-based Creative Coding environment for p5.js that seeks to support creative work by rethinking versioning. By distinguishing between structural and value-level change and combining non-linear navigation, direct code editing, parameter-level exploration, and continuous visual feedback, Reframe is designed to support divergence, reflection, and continued iteration while keeping source code as the creative medium.

Smartphones have become integral to everyday life, and despite the many advantages they bring, they also raise privacy and security concerns, particularly regarding nontransparent, unauthorized, or malicious data collection risks. While users are aware of these issues, the means the smart-phone’s operating system provides to manage the applications’ permissions and protect personal data often prove challenging or overwhelming for non-technical users. In this context, this article introduces Privacy Manager, a mobile application designed for Android devices that relies on an End-User Development (EUD) approach to offer personalized data protection and privacy security measures to bridge the gap for regular users. The application facilitates effective management of permissions granted to installed applications through user-friendly interfaces and customizable settings, enhancing user awareness and control over their data. A validation study was carried out with 8 participants over a week. The study involved an initial questionnaire followed by a week-long period of real-world application usage. It concluded with a final questionnaire with an assessment using the System Usability Scale (SUS).

In the development projects implemented by novices, the usefulness of the documentation in the form of comments on the final working code is minimal to guide future implementations. Such documentation does not account for novices’ development process, including their choices, the errors they faced, the solutions they found, the sources they consulted, the lessons learned, and the advice to remember or give to someone else. Indeed, novices do not usually rely on their documentation to keep track of the successes and errors they find during the development process. Nevertheless, if enabled to capture various moments of the process seamlessly, novices can produce documentation that has the potential to become a valuable asset for them and other developers. This paper presents Dear Diary, a tool to support non-expert programmers in straightforwardly creating documentation artifacts directly from the IDE.

Several tools have been developed to support novices learning to program. Most of them focus on the code and provide features regarding the visualization of the data structures or the debugging. However, in introductory programming courses, students are typically given exercises in the form of a problem written in natural language; and the first challenge they face is understanding the problem, identifying the relevant information, and then translating that information into code. To our knowledge, little attention has been paid to proposing tools targeted at supporting this problem-solving step, even though it is crucial for deriving a correct solution. In this paper, we present an IDE to encourage novices to understand the problem before start coding, decompose it down into subproblems, explore alternative implementations for each subproblem, and arrange these implementations to build a general solution. Finally, the adopted problem-solving approach is discussed.

This paper presents an exploratory study aimed at identifying the pain points that novice programmers experience, from the software engineering perspective, when developing and deploying smart and distributed systems, that may be classified as Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. The exploratory study was conducted among undergraduate students, that worked in groups for developing AmI projects during a university course. Based on their own experiences, individually and as a group, the pain points were identified and prioritized over a common architecture and a set of software development activities. The quantification of the pain points was based on the difficulty level that the students perceived on the development activities and the time they spent completing them. Results represent a starting point for the design of tools and methodologies targeted at overcoming the complexity that novice programmers face when developing AmI systems.