Related papers: Adaptive Scaffolding in Block-Based Programming vi…

Program synthesis is challenging largely because of the difficulty of search in a large space of programs. Human programmers routinely tackle the task of writing complex programs by writing sub-programs and then analyzing their intermediate…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

Continual learning algorithms which keep the parameters of new tasks close to that of previous tasks, are popular in preventing catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning settings. However, 1) the performance for the new continual…

Understanding students' misconceptions is important for effective teaching and assessment. However, discovering such misconceptions manually can be time-consuming and laborious. Automated misconception discovery can address these challenges…

The importance of programming education has lead to dedicated educational programming environments, where users visually arrange block-based programming constructs that typically control graphical, interactive game-like programs. The…

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…

We introduce the Adaptive Skills, Adaptive Partitions (ASAP) framework that (1) learns skills (i.e., temporally extended actions or options) as well as (2) where to apply them. We believe that both (1) and (2) are necessary for a truly…

Task-based programming models have proven to be a robust and versatile way to approach development of applications for distributed environments. They provide natural programming patterns with high performance. However, execution on this…

With the increasing popularity of online learning, intelligent tutoring systems are regaining increased attention. In this paper, we introduce adaptive algorithms for personalized assignment of learning tasks to student so that to improve…

This paper describes the design and evaluation of DSAScratch, an extension to Scratch, a widely used block-based programming language. The DSAScratch framework implements advanced data structures such as arrays, sets, dictionaries, and…

Several recent advances in AI systems solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models (LMs) to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as…

Adaptive Computing is an application-agnostic outer loop framework to strategically deploy simulations and experiments to guide decision making for scale-up analysis. Resources are allocated over successive batches, which makes the…

Computer programming represents a rapidly evolving and sought-after career path in the 21st century. Nevertheless, novice learners may find the process intimidating for several reasons, such as limited and highly competitive career…

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…

This paper extends the functionality of block ordering problems (such as Parsons problems and Proof Blocks) to include optional blocks. We detail the algorithms used to implement the optional block feature and present usage experiences from…

Design skills are increasingly recognized as a core competency for software professionals. Unfortunately, these skills are difficult to teach because design requires freedom and open-ended thinking, but new designers require a structured…

Proof Blocks is a software tool that allows students to practice writing mathematical proofs by dragging and dropping lines instead of writing proofs from scratch. Proof Blocks offers the capability of assigning partial credit and providing…

In many MOOCs, whenever a student completes a programming task, they can see previous solutions of other students to find potentially different ways of solving the problem and to learn new coding constructs. However, a lot of MOOCs simply…

Convexity, though extremely important in mathematical programming, has not drawn enough attention in the field of dynamic programming. This paper gives conditions for verifying convexity of the cost-to-go functions, and introduces an…

Programming skills are rapidly becoming essential for many educational paths and career opportunities. Yet, for many international students, the traditional approach to teaching introductory programming courses can be a significant…