Story telling approach for Integrating Software Blocks

Abstract

Story telling is a process of conveying events by words, images and sounds. It has been used in every culture as a means of entertainment, education or for instilling moral values. The power of story telling has now been realized by computer science and software engineering community. It has been argued that story telling will enable the actual requirement to be identified earlier in the software development process. This approach has also been identified as one of the most suitable approach for end-user software development. A number of software development environment based on story telling approach have been developed, such as Storytelling Alice and JPie. Storytelling Alice is a programming environment that enables end-users (in this case students) to create computer applications by creating short 3D animated movies. JPie is a programming environment that was designed to enable end-users to develop programs by using Java programming language. In this paper, we describe the design of a story telling approach for blocks integration in Block-Based Software Development Environment. A block is basically a single-layer software component that can perform a specific function. It is assumed that in this environment, there will be a large number of blocks to be used by the end-users through story telling approach. End-users can develop applications by writing instructions for selecting, customizing and combining software blocks to form a learning application as target application.