Online programming communities give novices places to explore computing through user-generated projects, but limited structure can hinder a steadily challenging learning path. Beginners often struggle to interpret key events and relationships in projects, connect them to core concepts, and remix practices. We present CoRemix, a generative-AI community support system that uses visual flowcharts to clarify project logic. CoRemix introduces a prompting pipeline paired with a visual-textual scaffold that guides learners in constructing flowcharts. We further incorporate static project analysis and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to raise the precision of large-language-model outputs. In technical evaluations, static analysis and RAG improved response quality. In a user study, CoRemix outperformed a baseline in helping learners understand complex projects, strengthen computing-concept skills, and report better learning experiences within online communities. These gains include clearer event sequencing, improved identification of relationships across sprites and scripts, stronger remix strategies, and higher perceived scaffolding for progressive challenge.

Programming is essential in K-12 education and fosters computational thinking skills. Given the complexity of programming and the advanced skills it requires, previous research has introduced user-friendly tools to support young learners. However, our interviews with six programming educators revealed that current tools often fail to reflect classroom learning objectives, offer flexible guidance, and foster creativity. Therefore, we introduced MindScratch, a multimodal generative AI (GAI)-powered visual programming support tool. MindScratch aims to balance structured classroom activities with free programming creation, supporting students in completing creative programming projects based on teacher-set learning objectives while also providing programming scaffolding. The results indicate that, compared to the baseline, MindScratch more effectively helps students achieve high-quality projects aligned with learning objectives. It also enhances students’ computational thinking and thinking. Overall, we believe that GAI-driven educational tools like MindScratch offer students a focused and engaging learning experience.

As Computational Thinking (CT) continues to permeate younger age groups in K-12 education, established CT platforms such as Scratch face challenges in catering to these younger learners, particularly those in the elementary school (ages 6-12). Through formative investigation with Scratch experts, we uncover three key obstacles to children’s autonomous Scratch learning: artist’s block in project planning, bounded creativity in asset creation, and inadequate coding guidance during implementation. To address these barriers, we introduce ChatScratch, an AI-augmented system to facilitate autonomous programming learning for young children. ChatScratch employs structured interactive storyboards and visual cues to overcome artist’s block, integrates digital drawing and advanced image generation technologies to elevate creativity, and leverages Scratch-specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) for professional coding guidance. Our study shows that, compared to Scratch, ChatScratch efficiently fosters autonomous programming learning, and contributes to the creation of high-quality, personally meaningful Scratch projects for children.

When translating UI design prototypes to code in industry, automatically generating code from design prototypes can expedite the development of applications and GUI iterations. However, in design prototypes without strict design specifications, UI components may be composed of fragmented elements. Grouping these fragmented elements can greatly improve the readability and maintainability of the generated code. Current methods employ a two-stage strategy that introduces hand-crafted rules to group fragmented elements. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods is not satisfying due to visually overlapped and tiny UI elements. In this study, we propose EGFE, a novel method for automatically End-to-end Grouping Fragmented Elements via UI sequence prediction. To facilitate the UI understanding, we innovatively construct a Transformer encoder to model the relationship between the UI elements with multi-modal representation learning. The evaluation on a dataset of 4606 UI prototypes collected from professional UI designers shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the precision (by 29.75%), recall (by 31.07%), and F1-score (by 30.39%) at edit distance threshold of 4. In addition, we conduct an empirical study to assess the improvement of the generated front-end code. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a real software engineering application. Our end-to-end fragmented elements grouping method creates opportunities for improving UI-related software engineering tasks.

With the fast-growing graphical user interface (GUI) development workload in the Internet industry, some work attempted to generate maintainable front-end code from GUI screenshots. It can be more suitable for using user interface (UI) design drafts that contain UI metadata. However, fragmented layers inevitably appear in the UI design drafts, which greatly reduces the quality of the generated code. None of the existing automated GUI techniques detects and merges the fragmented layers to improve the accessibility of generated code. In this paper, we propose UI layers merger (UILM), a vision-based method that can automatically detect and merge fragmented layers into UI components. Our UILM contains the merging area detector (MAD) and a layer merging algorithm. The MAD incorporates the boundary prior knowledge to accurately detect the boundaries of UI components. Then, the layer merging algorithm can search for the associated layers within the components’ boundaries and merge them into a whole. We present a dynamic data augmentation approach to boost the performance of MAD. We also construct a large-scale UI dataset for training the MAD and testing the performance of UILM. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the best baseline regarding merging area detection and achieves decent layer merging accuracy. A user study on a real application also confirms the effectiveness of our UILM.