PPIG 2021 - 32nd Annual Workshop 21 - 25 June 2021, online

The 32nd Annual Meeting of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG) will take place from 21 to 25 June. As the covid situation remains unclear this will be a virtual meeting. Rather than 2 ½ full days, the usual pre-covid format, we shall meet for a full week of half days, a format that worked very successfully last year. The half days will be from 4pm to 6pm British Summer Time (= UTC plus 1 hour).

PPIG is a diverse community with diverse interests. This year’s theme is games (maybe not only computer-based games): the psychology of game playing, the skills and tools for creating games, ludology, the place of games within the wider world, games for entertainment and serious games, politics of games and the community, the future of games …. Preference, of course, to contributions that blend our core disciplines of psychology and software and our recently-awakened interests in craft working and in the problems of interfacing across disciplines and communities.

Doctoral students are warmly invited to submit work to our consortium meetings, which have gained a reputation for being helpful, constructive and unthreatening.

PPIG was established in 1987 in order to bring together people from diverse communities to explore common interests in the psychological aspects of programming and in the computational aspects of psychology. “Programming”, here, is interpreted in the broadest sense to include any aspect of software creation. As always with PPIG, besides this year’s theme of games, we accept the widest range of submissions on a variety of topics, such as:

  • Programming and human cognition
  • Programming education and craft skill acquisition
  • Human centred design and evaluation of programming languages, languages, tools and infrastructure
  • Team/co-operative work in programming
  • End user programming
  • Distributed programming, programming distribution
  • Gender, age, culture and programming
  • New paradigms in programming
  • Code quality, readability, productivity and re-use
  • Mistakes, bugs and errors
  • Notational design
  • Unconventional interactions and quasi-programming
  • Non-human programming
  • Technology support for creativity
  • Music(al) programming
  • Liveness and interactivity in programming

We welcome the following categories of submissions:

  • Papers: No explicit limit - as long as the reader’s interest is maintained, usually < 10 pages
  • Short Work-In-Progress papers: about 4 pages, but use more if needed
  • Doctoral consortium submissions: about 2 pages, but use more if needed
  • Reflections, artworks, and system demonstrations, typically 1 page abstract

Note: We are also reintroducing the category of short Work-In-Progress papers. These are opportunities to present emerging ideas and receive constructive discussion. Please use the EasyChair submission route for standard papers, but include [WIP] at the end of your title.

Please use our templates for papers. Submissions for the workshop should be uploaded to EasyChair.

Important dates:

Full papers and Work-in-Progress papers:

  • Abstract: as soon as possible, please
  • Paper submission deadline: May 17 May 31, 2021

Doctoral Consortium and demos:

  • Abstract submission deadline: May 10 May 31, 2021

Authors will be notified: asap, at latest June 14, 2021

Conference: 21-25 June, 2021

Post-proceedings:

  • PPIG uses a post-proceedings process, so that authors can incorporate the conference discussion into their final paper.
  • Camera-ready submission deadline will be announced at the conference, and has usually been ~1 month after the last day of the conference.

The conference will be virtually co-hosted by the Universities of York, UK, and Boulder, Colorado, USA.

We look forward to hearing from you.
Thomas Green and Clayton Lewis

All questions about submissions should be emailed to thosgreen@gmail.com