Hank: a friendly cognitive modelling language for psychology students

Cognitive modelling involves building computational models of psychological theories in order to learn more about them, and is a major research area allied to psychology and artificial intelligence. The main problem is that few psychology students have previous programming experience. The course lecturer can avoid the problem by presenting the area only in general terms. This leaves the programming side, which is central to the methodology, a closed book. Alternatively, students can be introduced to one of the existing cognitive modelling languages, though this can easily be overwhelming, hindering rather than helping their understanding. Our solution was to design and build a programming language for the intended population. The result is Hank, a visual cognitive modelling language for the non-programmer. The design of Hank drew on research areas including end-user programming and software visualization to find an appropriate design. A number of empirical studies are planned.