"React", "Command", or "Instruct"? Teachers Mental Models on End-User Development
Margherita Andrao, Federica Gini, Francesco Greco, Alessandro Cappelletti, Giuseppe Desolda, Barbara Treccani, Massimo Zancanaro · 2025
This paper presents findings from a thinking-aloud protocol exploring mental models in 28 elementary school math teachers during their initial attempt at composing and testing trigger-action rules for a smart tangible educational device. In the study, two sets of event-driven primitives were implemented in an End-User Development platform for guiding teachers with no programming experience in defining new functions of the device: "concrete", based on actual actions performed on the device, and "abstract", based on general definitions of events/actions. With a thematic analysis, we identified three different metaphors that drive participants’ interaction with the device. We discuss how the metaphors influenced performance and how the order of exposition to the two primitive sets impacted their grasping of the trigger-action logic. Our findings suggest the importance of guiding teachers in assuming effective metaphors for performing End-User Development tasks, to empower them to adopt an active role toward digital devices in education.