Spelling taught through memorization often fails many learners, particularly children with language-based learning disorders who struggle with the phonological skills necessary to spell words accurately. Educators such as speech-language pathologists (SLPs) address this instructional gap by using an inquiry-based approach to teach spelling that targets the phonology, morphology, meaning, and etymology of words. Yet, these strategies rarely appear in everyday writing tools, which simply detect and autocorrect errors. We introduce SPIRE (Spelling Inquiry Engine), a spell check system that brings this inquiry-based pedagogy into the act of composition. SPIRE implements Pedagogical Program Synthesis, a novel approach for operationalizing the inherently dynamic pedagogy of spelling instruction. SPIRE represents SLP instructional moves in a domain-specific language, synthesizes tailored programs in real-time from learner errors, and renders them as interactive interfaces for inquiry-based interventions. With SPIRE, spelling errors become opportunities to explore word meanings, word structures, morphological families, word origins, and grapheme-phoneme correspondences, supporting metalinguistic reasoning alongside correction. Evaluation with SLPs and learners shows alignment with professional practice and potential for integration into writing workflows.

International audience

Composers use music notation programs throughout their creative process. Those programs are essentially elaborate structured document editors that enable composers to create high-quality scores by enforcing musical notation rules. They effectively support music engraving, but impede the more creative stages in the composition process because of their lack of flexibility. Composers thus often combine these desktop tools with other mediums such as paper. Interactive surfaces that support pen and touch input have the potential to address the tension between the contradicting needs for structure and flexibility. We interview nine professional composers. We report insights about their thought process and creative intentions, and rely on the “Cognitive Dimensions of Notations” framework to capture the frictions they experience when materializing those intentions on a score. We then discuss how interactive surfaces could increase flexibility by temporarily breaking the structure when manipulating the notation.

Spreadsheet programs for interactive surfaces have limited manipulations capabilities and are often frustrating to use. One key reason is that the spreadsheet grid creates a layer that intercepts most user input events, making it difficult to reach the cell values that lie underneath. We conduct an analysis of commercial spreadsheet programs and an elicitation study to understand what users can do and what they would like to do with spreadsheets on interactive surfaces. Informed by these, we design interaction techniques that leverage the precision of the pen to mitigate friction between the different layers. These enable more operations by direct manipulation on and through the grid, targeting not only cells and groups of cells, but values and substrings within and across cells as well. We prototype these interaction techniques and conduct a qualitative study with information workers who perform a variety of spreadsheet operations on their own data.