The Ceptre Editor: A Structure Editor for Rule-Based System Simulation
Alexander Card, Chris Martens · 2019
Systems understanding is a skill required to solve many of the world’s most important problems, from climate change to immunotherapy to social decision-making. However, these problems also require communication among experts with diverse skill sets and academic backgrounds. Our long-term goal is to facilitate systems understanding across a range of disciplines through end-user computational modeling tools. This paper presents the Ceptre Editor, a structure editor for the rule-based programming language Ceptre. The Ceptre Editor runs in the browser and offers a visual interface and integrated development environment for Ceptre, following design recommendations from end-user programming, with the goal of providing discoverable affordances for program construction and maintaining syntactic well-formedness at each edit state. We performed a preliminary evaluation of the tool through a qualitative study, assessing the editors effectiveness at helping users understand and extended a system model, and found promising results regarding learnability and mental model accuracy.