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We describe a code reuse tool for use in the Looking Glass IDE, the successor to Storytelling Alice [17], which enables middle school students with little to no programming experience to reuse functionality they find in programs written by others. Users (1) record a feature to reuse, (2) find code responsible for the feature, (3) abstract the code into a reusable Actionscript by describing object "roles," and (4) integrate the Actionscript into another program. An exploratory study with middle school students indicates they can successfully reuse code. Further, 36 of the 47 users appropriated new programming constructs through the process of reuse.
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Gross et al. (2010) studied this question.