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Producing high-quality code is essential as it makes a codebase more maintainable, reducing the cost and effort associated with a project. However, students learning to program are often given short, automatically graded programming tasks…

Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…

Within PCB design, the reuse of circuit design blocks is a major preventing factor inhibiting beginners from reusing designs made by experts, a common practice in software but non-existent in circuit design at large. Despite efforts to…

Programming is increasingly taught using block-based languages like Scratch. While the use of blocks prevents syntax errors, learners can still make semantic mistakes, requiring feedback and help. As teachers may be overwhelmed by help…

Generative machine learning models have recently been applied to source code, for use cases including translating code between programming languages, creating documentation from code, and auto-completing methods. Yet, state-of-the-art…

Developers often dedicate significant time to maintaining and refactoring existing code. However, most prior work on generative models for code focuses solely on creating new code, overlooking the distinctive needs of editing existing code.…

The conversion of user epics or stories into their appropriate representation in pseudocode or code is a time-consuming task, which can take up a large portion of the time in an industrial project. With this research paper, we aim to…

This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to help novice programmers. Current analyzers have been built to give feedback to experienced programmers who build new applications or systems. The type of feedback and the type of…

We present a structure-aware code editor, called Deuce, that is equipped with direct manipulation capabilities for invoking automated program transformations. Compared to traditional refactoring environments, Deuce employs a direct…

Static analysis tools are frequently used to scan the source code and detect deviations from the project coding guidelines. Given their importance, linters are often introduced to classrooms to educate students on how to detect and…

Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has…

Supporting programming on touchscreen devices requires effective text input and editing methods. Unfortunately, the virtual keyboard can be inefficient and uses valuable screen space on already small devices. Recent advances in stylus input…

Programming language understanding and representation (a.k.a code representation learning) has always been a hot and challenging task in software engineering. It aims to apply deep learning techniques to produce numerical representations of…

Access to high-quality education at scale is limited by the difficulty of providing student feedback on open-ended assignments in structured domains like computer programming, graphics, and short response questions. This problem has proven…

Decomposition and abstraction is an essential component of computational thinking, yet it is not always emphasized in introductory programming courses. In addition, as generative AI further reduces the focus on syntax and increases the…

Training a deep learning model on source code has gained significant traction recently. Since such models reason about vectors of numbers, source code needs to be converted to a code representation before vectorization. Numerous approaches…

We compare the performance of a transition-based parser in regards to different annotation schemes. We pro-pose to convert some specific syntactic constructions observed in the universal dependency treebanks into a so-called more standard…

Pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance in both natural language processing and program understanding, which represent the input as a token sequence without explicitly modeling its structure. Some prior works…

English has a convoluted relationship between its pronunciation and spelling, which obscures its phonological structure for early literacy learners. This convoluted relationship has implications for early literacy software, particularly for…

Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT now provide novice programmers with instant, personalized support and are reshaping computing education. While a growing body of work examines AI's immediate impacts, longitudinal evidence remains…