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Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

Unit tests are widely used to check source code quality, but they can be too coarse-grained or ill-suited for testing individual program statements. We introduce inline tests to make it easier to check for faults in statements. We motivate…

We examined the efficacy of AI-assisted learning in an introductory programming course at the university level by using a GPT-4 model to generate personalized hints for compiler errors within a platform for automated assessment of…

Prior research has raised concerns about students' over-reliance on large language models (LLMs) in higher education. This paper examines how Computer Science students and instructors engage with LLMs across five scenarios: "Writing",…

Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…

Teaching Computer Science (CS) students how to comprehend and maintain legacy code bases is a critical challenge in software engineering education. While Generative AI (GenAI) assistants like GitHub Copilot improve task completion speed and…

The increasing demand for programming language education and growing class sizes require immediate and personalized feedback. However, traditional code review methods have limitations in providing this level of feedback. As the capabilities…

In recent years, Jupyter notebooks have grown in popularity in several domains of software engineering, such as data science, machine learning, and computer science education. Their popularity has to do with their rich features for…

As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or…

Background and Context: Large Language Models (LLMs) are more accessible and accurate than ever before, raising significant concerns for computing educators. One major concern is students using LLMs to bypass the effort needed to understand…

Providing valuable and personalized feedback is essential for effective learning, but delivering it promptly can be challenging in large-scale courses. Recent research has explored automated feedback mechanisms across various programming…

The integration of ChatGPT as a supportive tool in education, notably in programming courses, addresses the unique challenges of programming education by providing assistance with debugging, code generation, and explanations. Despite…

Procrastination causes student stress, reduced learning and performance, and results in very busy help sessions immediately before deadlines. A key challenge is encouraging students to complete assignments earlier rather than waiting until…

A rapidly growing body of research is examining how LLMs influence developers when they code. To date, this research has tended to focus on productivity and code quality outcomes, rather than the underlying cognitive processes involved in…

The abilities of Generative-Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce real-time, sophisticated responses across diverse contexts has promised a huge potential in physics education, particularly in providing customized feedback. In this study,…

Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in code-generation models that produce source code from natural language and code-based prompts with high accuracy. This is likely to have profound effects in the classroom, where novices…

Context: Dependency Injection (DI) is a commonly applied mechanism to decouple classes from their dependencies in order to provide higher modularization. However, bad DI practices often lead to negative consequences, such as increasing…

Providing personalized assistance at scale is a long-standing challenge for computing educators, but a new generation of tools powered by large language models (LLMs) offers immense promise. Such tools can, in theory, provide on-demand help…

This paper is a reproduction of work by Ray et al. which claimed to have uncovered a statistically significant association between eleven programming languages and software defects in projects hosted on GitHub. First we conduct an…

Programming courses can be challenging for first year university students, especially for those without prior coding experience. Students initially struggle with code syntax, but as more advanced topics are introduced across a semester, the…