Prof. Alexander Repenning

The design of end user programming environments requires the understanding of the intricate relationships among people, tools, and problems. Many end users do either not have the necessary skills, the time or the patience to compose programs from computer science sanctioned programming primitives. End users require domain-oriented programming approaches that elevate the task of programming to the manipulation of components that are directly pertinent to tasks at hand. My work is focused around a programming substrate called Agentsheets to create domain-oriented programming and simulation environments. The construction paradigm employed by Agentsheets consists of a large number of autonomous, communicating agents organized in a grid, called the agentsheet. Agents utilize different communication modalities such as animation, sound, and speech. A number of educational and industrial applications are used to illustrate the use and design of Agentsheets applications in domains such as art, artificial life, environmental design, games, genetic programming, network design, kitchen design, and visual programming. [Publications | Awards | News | AgentSheets®]

Short Bio Alexander Repenning is a research assistant professor and member of the Center of LifeLong Learning & Design at the University of Colorado. He has worked in research and development at Asea Brown Boveri, Xerox PARC, and Hewlett Packard. His general research interests include education and computers, new approaches to programming, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. Repenning received his Ph.D. in computer science and the certificate of cognitive science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1993. At the University of Colorado Repenning has raised over $4 million for research in end-user programmable interactive simulations. He has collaborated with researchers at the MIT Media lab, LEGO and SRI to explore programmable LEGO toys; at Apple to design next generation authoring tools for education and to found the Educational Object Economy; and at SRI International to build digital libraries of Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT). AgentSheets® is a registered trademark

Address Prof. Alexander Repenning University of Colorado Department of Computer Science and Center of LifeLong Learning & Design Campus Box 430 Boulder, CO 80309-0430 office: ECOT 532 phone: (303) 492-1349 fax: (303) 492-2844 email: ralex@cs.colorado.edu http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/