TA Bot Report: AI Assistants in CS1 Save Students Homework Time and Reduce Demands on Staff. (Now What?)
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Chatbot interfaces for LLMs enable students to get immediate, interactive help on homework assignments, but even a thoughtfully-designed bot may not serve all pedagogical goals. In this paper, we report on the development and deployment of a GPT-4-based interactive homework assistant (“TA Bot”) for students in a large CS1 course; over 2000 students made over 100,000 requests of our bot across two semesters. Our assistant offers one-shot, contextual feedback, primarily through a low-friction “get feedback” prompt within the command-line “autograder” our students already run to test their code. Our Bot wraps student code in a custom prompt that supports our pedagogical goals and avoids providing solutions directly. We discuss our deployment and then analyze the impacts of our Bot on students, primarily through student-reported feedback and tracking of student homework progress. We find reductions in homework-related question rates in our course forum, as well as substantial reductions in homework completion time when our Bot is available. For students in the 50th-80th percentile, these reductions typically exceed 30 minutes per assignment, over 4 standard deviations faster than the mean in prior semesters. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of these observations, the potential impacts on student learning, as well as other potential costs and benefits of AI assistance in CS1.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Thu 27 FebDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
10:45 - 12:00 | |||
10:45 18mTalk | Coordinate: A Virtual Classroom Management Tool For Large Computer Science Courses Using Discord Papers | ||
11:03 18mTalk | Investigating the Presence and Development of Student Instructor Preferences in a Large-Scale CS1 Course Papers Yiqiu Zhou University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Luc Paquette University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Geoffrey Challen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | ||
11:22 18mTalk | TA Bot Report: AI Assistants in CS1 Save Students Homework Time and Reduce Demands on Staff. (Now What?) Papers J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira UC Berkeley, Laryn Qi University of California, Berkeley, Bjoern Hartmann UC Berkeley, John DeNero UC Berkeley, Narges Norouzi University of California, Berkeley | ||
11:41 18mTalk | The Impact of Group Discussion and Formation on Student Performance: An Experience Report in a Large CS1 Course Papers Tong Wu Virginia Tech, Xiaohang Tang Virginia Tech, Sam Wong , Xi Chen , Cliff Shaffer Virginia Tech, Yan Chen Virginia Tech, USA |