AP-coach: Formative feedback generation for learning introductory programming concepts
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
12-2022
Abstract
In this work, we aim to improve code writing skill in Python-based introductory programming courses for first-year university students. In such courses, students as novice programmers would benefit from personalised and formative feedback to: 1) quickly identify issues in their computational thinking process or coding techniques, and 2) know how to proceed when facing a certain problem. Due to the large number of students, it is impractical for instructors to manually assess all the work of each student to provide tailored feedback. We design and implement Automatic Programming Coach (AP-Coach), a web-based tool for automatically generating formative feedback for exercises on basic programming concepts. AP-Coach combines software engineering techniques (code similarity measures based on abstract syntax trees, and unit testing), and AI techniques (machine translation) in a novel manner to provide relevant feedback. We report promising results for AP-Coach in the following aspects: 1) quantitative evaluation of code similarity computation and machine translation, 2) qualitative evaluation of the perceived quality and usability of auto-generated feedback, and 3) experience of a selected group of computing students using the system.
Keywords
learning programming, formative feedback, machine translation, code similarity.
Discipline
Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering, Hong Kong, December 4-7: Proceedings
First Page
323
Last Page
330
ISBN
9781665491174
Identifier
10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00060
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Citation
TA, Nguyen Binh Duong; SHAR, Lwin Khin; and SHANKARARAMAN, Venky.
AP-coach: Formative feedback generation for learning introductory programming concepts. (2022). 2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering, Hong Kong, December 4-7: Proceedings. 323-330.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7622
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE54877.2022.00060