Related papers: How to Design While Loops

Best practices in programming need to be emphasized in a CS1 course as bad student habits persist if not reinforced well. The C++ programming language, although a relatively old language, has been regularly updated with new versions since…

For the past five years advanced students have developed projects for our redesigned Calculus II classes to use. Our student project designers are often mathematically early in their careers, and so this provides them with an opportunity to…

Continual learning is the ability to sequentially learn over time by accommodating knowledge while retaining previously learned experiences. Neural networks can learn multiple tasks when trained on them jointly, but cannot maintain…

Automatically generating invariants, key to computer-aided analysis of probabilistic and deterministic programs and compiler optimisation, is a challenging open problem. Whilst the problem is in general undecidable, the goal is settled for…

The World model is an existing functional input-output mechanism for event-driven programming. It is used in numerous popular textbooks and curricular settings. The World model conflates two different tasks -- the definition of an event…

Two fundamental challenges face generative models in engineering applications: the acquisition of high-performing, diverse datasets, and the adherence to precise constraints in generated designs. We propose a novel approach combining…

Sequences have become first class citizens in supervised learning thanks to the resurgence of recurrent neural networks. Many complex tasks that require mapping from or to a sequence of observations can now be formulated with the…

The phase-ordering problem of modern compilers has received a lot of attention from the research community over the years, yet remains largely unsolved. Various optimization sequences exposed to the user are manually designed by compiler…

Although neural module networks have an architectural bias towards compositionality, they require gold standard layouts to generalize systematically in practice. When instead learning layouts and modules jointly, compositionality does not…

Novice programmers need to write basic code as part of the learning process, but they often face difficulties. To assist struggling students, we recently implemented personalized Parsons problems, which are code puzzles where students…

Structured learning is appropriate when predicting structured outputs such as trees, graphs, or sequences. Most prior work requires the training set to consist of complete trees, graphs or sequences. Specifying such detailed ground truth…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the field of computing education with their powerful code-generating capabilities. Traditional pedagogical practices have focused on code writing tasks, but there is now a shift in importance…

A loop invariant is a property of a loop that remains true before and after each execution of the loop. The identification of loop invariants is a critical step to support automated program safety assessment. Recent advancements in Large…

Quantum circuits that generate coherent superpositions of stochastic processes are key to many downstream quantum-accelerated tasks, such as risk analysis, importance sampling, and DNA sequencing. However, traditional methods for designing…

We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open…

With their remarkable ability to generate code, large language models (LLMs) are a transformative technology for computing education practice. They have created an urgent need for educators to rethink pedagogical approaches and teaching…

Invariants are key to formal loop verification as they capture loop properties that are valid before and after each loop iteration. Yet, generating invariants is a notorious task already for syntactically restricted classes of loops. Rather…

Choices in the semantics and the signature of a theory are integral in determining how the theory is used and how challenging it is to reason over it. Our interest in this paper lies in the SMT theory of sequences. Various versions of it…

In this paper, we reflect on the educational challenges and research opportunities in running data visualization design activities in the context of large courses. With the increasing number and sizes of data visualization course, we need…

Large language models (LLMs) are now used in multi-turn workflows, but we still lack a clear way to measure when iteration helps and when it hurts. We present an evaluation framework for iterative refinement that spans ideation, code, and…