Communication and teamwork are essential skills for software developers. However, these skills are often difficult to learn for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We designed, developed, and ran a 13-day, remote video game coding camp for incoming college first-year students with ASD. We developed instructional materials to teach computer programming, video game design, and communication and teaming skills. Students used the MakeCode Arcade development environment to build their games and Zoom to remotely collaborate with their teammates. In summative interviews, students reported improved programming skills, increased confidence in communication, and better experiences working with others. We also found that students valued the opportunity to practice teaming, such as being more vocal in expressing ideas to their peers and working out differences of opinion with their teammates. Two students reported the remote learning environment decreased their anxiety and stress, both are frequent challenges for autistic people. We plan to rerun the camp next year with materials that we have made available online.

There are many benefits to pair programming, including increased knowledge transfer, higher quality code, increased code comprehension, and team bonding. Unfortunately, when programmers work remotely, it becomes more challenging to collaborate. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has become increasingly popular in domains outside of software engineering. It allows humans to experience increased social presence, a key for collaboration, while still working remotely. In the last few years, and even more so recently, remote work has become very common for software engineers. In this paper, we explore remote pair programming and code comprehension in virtual reality. We conducted remote pair programming experiments with a total of 40 professional programmers. Half of the participants pair programmed using VR as a tool and the other half used a screen sharing system to collaborate. We found that programmers solved almost twice as many bugs using VR. We also found that the time taken to solve bugs was, on average, reduced when working in the VR environment than using the state of the art.

Software development teams dedicate considerable resources to training newcomers. Newcomers are new developers to a software project. The software onboarding process is more complicated than onboarding into other organizations. It is much more challenging and time-consuming. The role of a mentor in onboarding newcomers in software engineering is well understood. However, the disruptions to the work of an experienced developer can reduce the quality of their work and job satisfaction. We propose a conversational bot that can help onboard newcomers to a software project instead of an experienced programmer. The bot will act as a mentor for the newcomer, thus putting less stress on experienced programmers. The bot will also be able to scan outside sources, such as stack overflow, for solutions to issues a newcomer may face. The newcomer will be able to interact with the bot using natural language. We will use this bot to assess improvements to code quality in future studies.

Virtual reality is an emerging technology for various domains such as medicine, psychotherapy, architecture, and gaming. Recently, software engineering researchers have started to explore virtual reality as a tool for programmers. However, few studies examine source code comprehension in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In this paper, we explore the human experience of comprehending source code in VR. We conducted a study with 26 graduate students. We found that the programmers experienced more challenges when reading and comprehending code in VR. We found no statistically significant difference in the programmers' perceived productivity between our VR and traditional comprehension studies.

In this paper, we consider the effect of different types of virtual annotations on performance during a navigation task in virtual reality. Two major types of annotations were shown to users: screen-fixed annotations that remained fixed in the user’s field of view, and world- fixed annotations that are linked to specific locations in the world. We also considered three different levels of navigation information, including destination markers, maps visualizing the layout of the space being navigated, and path markers showing the optimal route to the destination. We ran a within-subjects study where participants completed three trials with each of the six combinations of annotation type and information level, for a total of 18 trials in a virtual environment. Average speed, distance traveled, and the time taken to reach the destination were recorded during each trial. Participants were also asked to point back to where they started the trial upon reaching the destination, as a measure of spatial memory. Finally, participants were tasked with completing a secondary activity while navigating, so as to assess what effect annotation types had on multitasking performance. Participants navigated significantly more quickly when using world-fixed annotations; however an interaction effect was observed between the type of annotation and the level of information, which suggests that world-fixed annotations are not inherently better than screen-fixed annotations; instead, it is important to consider both the type of annotation and what information it displays.