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Thesis Proposals for the S&DE Seminar

A world map of the places I have visited, for work and for fun.

Schweizer Jugend forscht Study Week "Coding Camp 2026", hosted at USI

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are programming languages that are tailored to a particular application domain. This essential focus of DSLs allows one to write more concise and understandable programs, with tight stakeholder integration, and, when done properly, to improve code quality. The course will feature the current state of the art in both the design and implementation of DSLs. The course will emphasize the different design dimensions of DSLs, the involved language paradigms and features, and the drawbacks with respect to simple API modeling.

Thanks to its popularity, Super Mario Maker 2 (SMM2) features myriad user-designed platforming levels that span a broad range of styles, genres, difficulty, and quality. This paper is a first attempt at charting out this vast landscape of levels, with the goal of exploring the main concepts that characterize design quality. To this end, we first selected 500 videos by popular YouTube streamers that play SMM2 levels. With the help of an LLM, we extracted and clustered by topic segments where the streamer comments about the design of the level they are playing. Then, we applied a grounded theory coding process to extract the concepts emerging in these segments, and we combined and organized them hierarchically. The resulting taxonomy identifies the main abstract concepts that pertain to the design of a level in SMM2 and its resulting quality, as well as several concrete elements of the game that belong to each abstract category. Besides illustrating the underlying dimensions that characterize design quality in SMM2, our results also illuminate the diverse landscape of player-designed levels in the game.

Programming skills are essential but not enough to develop large and complex software systems that require the coordination of a team of specialists. Software engineering is about the development of such moderns software systems. Students will learn to go beyond programming, to coordinate a team, to apply modern methodologies and techniques.

Robert Gomez Cueva · Bachelor of Science in Informatics

Andrey Kan · Bachelor of Science in Informatics