Related papers: From {Solution Synthesis} to {Student Attempt Synt…
Generative AI is transforming computing education by enabling the automatic generation of personalized content and feedback. We investigate its capabilities in providing high-quality programming tasks to students. Despite promising…
Block-based visual programming environments play an increasingly important role in introducing computing concepts to K-12 students. In recent years, they have also gained popularity in neuro-symbolic AI, serving as a benchmark to evaluate…
Generative neural models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by synthesizing new content. We seek to design neural models that can automatically generate programming tasks for a given specification in the context of visual…
When giving automated feedback to a student working on a beginner's exercise, many programming tutors run into a completeness problem. On the one hand, we want a student to experiment freely. On the other hand, we want a student to write…
Block-based programming environments are increasingly used to introduce computing concepts to beginners. However, novice students often struggle in these environments, given the conceptual and open-ended nature of programming tasks. To…
Block-based visual programming environments play a critical role in introducing computing concepts to K-12 students. One of the key pedagogical challenges in these environments is in designing new practice tasks for a student that match a…
Program synthesis is the process of automatically translating a specification into computer code. Traditional synthesis settings require a formal, precise specification. Motivated by computer education applications where a student learns to…
In recent years, the XLogoOnline programming platform has gained popularity among novice learners. It integrates the Logo programming language with visual programming, providing a visual interface for learning computing concepts. However,…
How students utilize immediate tutoring feedback in programming education depends on various factors. Among them are the feedback quality, but also students' engagement, i.e., their perception, interpretation, and use of feedback. However,…
Progress in the field of machine learning has been fueled by the introduction of benchmark datasets pushing the limits of existing algorithms. Enabling the design of datasets to test specific properties and failure modes of learning…
The goal of active learning for program synthesis is to synthesize the desired program by asking targeted questions that minimize user interaction. While prior work has explored active learning in the purely symbolic setting, such…
This study is part of a larger project focused on measuring, understanding, and improving student engagement in programming education. We investigate whether synthetic data generation can help identify at-risk students earlier in a small,…
A widely adopted strategy for model enhancement is to use synthetic data generated by a stronger model for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, for emerging reasoning models like Qwen3-8B, this approach often fails to improve reasoning…
Background and context: Debugging is a significant and often frustrating challenge for beginner programmers. Understanding students' debugging behaviours and strategies can help to identify common difficulties and inform approaches for…
Program synthesis aims to automatically construct human-readable programs that satisfy given task specifications, such as input/output pairs or demonstrations. Recent works have demonstrated encouraging results in a variety of domains, such…
The problem of automatically generating a computer program from some specification has been studied since the early days of AI. Recently, two competing approaches for automatic program learning have received significant attention: (1)…
Generative models have demonstrated human-level proficiency in various benchmarks across domains like programming, natural sciences, and general knowledge. Despite these promising results on competitive benchmarks, they still struggle with…
Intelligent Tutoring Systems often grant learners shared control over skill and problem selection. This choice brings motivational and metacognitive benefits. At the same time, past literature suggests that learners exhibit diverse…
As generative AI systems are integrated into educational settings, students often encounter AI-generated output while working through learning tasks, either by requesting help or through integrated tools. Trust in AI can influence how…
The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student…