Case Study: Design Strategies for Enabling Visual Application Blocks of Bluetooth Library

Abstract

Block-based tools can make it easier for beginners to learn programming by arranging blocks. Their block concept and extensible characteristics make block-based designs suitable for introductory programming. However, block-based tools are easy to use but difficult to extend to include the complicated applications of vendor libraries or domain-specific libraries. This paper proposes a solution to block design strategies that enable designers to redefine and design domain-specific libraries to generate visual application blocks. This research uses the Bluetooth library as a case study and constructs the BlocklyTooth integrated development environment (IDE) using the Google Blockly tool. A feasibility evaluation of this study produced the following findings: (1) for the strategies, the usability of the usability metric for user experience (UMUX) and the practicality of the customized theme received satisfactory responses; and (2) for the IDE, the usability of UMUX and the value implication of the customized theme received positive reviews. In addition, the experiment on resource impact revealed that the strategies are effective in improving resource utilization, in which the quantity of code is reduced by 70.2% and 89% in terms of the block count and lines of code, respectively, and the system memory is reduced by 51.8% in terms of the dynamic code size. The results indicate that the proposed solution can be a design reference guideline for block-based tools and can effectively abstract the complex Bluetooth library into blocks.