AI Friends: A Design Framework for AI-Powered Creative Programming for Youth

What role can AI play in supporting and constraining creative coding by families? To investigate these questions, we built a Wizard of Oz platform to help families engage in creative coding in partnership with a researcher-operated AI Friend. We designed a 3 week series of programming activities with ten children, 7 to 12 years old, and nine parents. Using a creative self efficacy lens, we observe that families found it easier to generate game ideas when prompted with questions by AI Friend; parents played a unique role in guiding children in more complex programming tasks when the AI Friend failed to help, and children were more encouraged to write code for novel ideas using the AI friend help. These findings suggest that AI supported platforms should highlight unique family AI interactions focused on children's agency and creative self-efficacy.

Scout: Rapid Exploration of Interface Layout Alternatives through High-Level Design Constraints

Although exploring alternatives is fundamental to creating better interface designs, current processes for creating alternatives are generally manual, limiting the alternatives a designer can explore. We present Scout, a system that helps designers rapidly explore alternatives through mixed-initiative interaction with high-level constraints and design feedback. Prior constraint-based layout systems use low-level spatial constraints and generally produce a single design. Tosupport designer exploration of alternatives, Scout introduces high-level constraints based on design concepts (e.g.,~semantic structure, emphasis, order) and formalizes them into low-level spatial constraints that a solver uses to generate potential layouts. In an evaluation with 18 interface designers, we found that Scout: (1) helps designers create more spatially diverse layouts with similar quality to those created with a baseline tool and (2) can help designers avoid a linear design process and quickly ideate layouts they do not believe they would have thought of on their own.