Related papers: Interleaving Natural Language Prompting with Code …
AI-powered planning tools show promise in supporting programming learners by enabling early, formative feedback on their thinking processes prior to coding. To date, however, most AI-supported planning tools rely on students'…
Effective prompt engineering is critical to realizing the promised productivity gains of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, many users struggle to craft prompts that yield high-quality outputs, limiting the…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain in popularity, it is important to understand how novice programmers use them. We present a thematic analysis of 33 learners, aged 10-17, independently learning Python through 45 code-authoring tasks…
Generative AI systems have revolutionized human interaction by enabling natural language-based coding and problem solving. However, the inherent ambiguity of natural language often leads to imprecise instructions, forcing users to…
The use of automatic grading tools has become nearly ubiquitous in large undergraduate programming courses, and recent work has focused on improving the quality of automatically generated feedback. However, there is a relative lack of data…
When designing a program, both novice programmers and seasoned developers alike often sketch out -- or, perhaps more famously, whiteboard -- their ideas. Yet despite the introduction of natively multimodal Generative AI models, work on…
With the recent advances in AI programming assistants such as GitHub Copilot, programming is not limited to classical programming languages anymore--programming tasks can also be expressed and solved by end-users in natural text. Despite…
Language model prompt optimization research has shown that semantically and grammatically well-formed manually crafted prompts are routinely outperformed by automatically generated token sequences with no apparent meaning or syntactic…
AI-powered coding assistants can support students in programming courses by providing on-demand explanations and debugging help. However, existing research often focuses on individual tools, leaving a gap in evidence-based design…
Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a leap in artificial intelligence, excelling in tasks using human language(s). Although the main focus of general-purpose LLMs is not code generation, they have shown promising results in the domain.…
Large language model performance can be improved in a large number of ways. Many such techniques, like fine-tuning or advanced tool usage, are time-intensive and expensive. Although prompt engineering is significantly cheaper and often…
Students are increasingly relying on Generative AI (GAI) to support their writing-a key pedagogical practice in education. In GAI-assisted writing, students can delegate core cognitive tasks (e.g., generating ideas and turning them into…
Providing feedback on programming assignments manually is a tedious, error prone, and time-consuming task. In this paper, we motivate and address the problem of generating feedback on performance aspects in introductory programming…
The field of prompt engineering is becoming an essential phenomenon in artificial intelligence. It is altering how data scientists interact with large language models (LLMs) for analytics applications. This research paper shares empirical…
Reading, understanding and explaining code have traditionally been important skills for novices learning programming. As large language models (LLMs) become prevalent, these foundational skills are more important than ever given the…
AI-supported tools can help learners overcome challenges in programming education by providing adaptive assistance. However, existing research often focuses on individual tools rather than deriving broader design recommendations. A key…
The introductory programming sequence has been the focus of much research in computing education. The recent advent of several viable and freely-available AI-driven code generation tools present several immediate opportunities and…
Background: In times when the ability to program is becoming increasingly important, it is still difficult to teach students to become successful programmers. One remarkable aspect are recent findings from neuro-imaging studies, which…
Generative AI, such as image generation models and large language models, stands to provide tremendous value to end-user programmers in creative and knowledge workflows. Current research methods struggle to engage end-users in a realistic…
GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence model for automatically generating source code from natural language problem descriptions. Since June 2022, Copilot has officially been available for free to all students as a plug-in to…