End-user strategy programming

Rule-based programming systems can be fragile because they force the user to account for all logical alternatives. If an unconsidered case does arise during execution, program behavior falls through the cracks into unspecified behavior. We investigate rule-based, end-user strategy programming by introducing our Interactive Football Playbook— a domain specific, end-user programming environment to allow American football coaches to create animated football scenarios by associating strategy information with virtual football players. We address the problem of rule explosion through ‘‘rule bending’’ to support a minimalist, scaffolding-driven programming environment. Additionally, we introduce visual language representations for logical and sequential ‘‘and’’ to mitigate end-user confusion with the semantic meaning of these ‘‘and’’ constructs. & 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.