Blogs (5) >>
Thu 27 Feb 2025 11:22 - 11:41 at Meeting Room 406 - CS1 Large Class Experiences/Tools Chair(s): Ana Paula Centeno

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.

Thu 27 Feb

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10:45 - 12:00
CS1 Large Class Experiences/ToolsPapers at Meeting Room 406
Chair(s): Ana Paula Centeno Rutgers University
10:45
18m
Talk
Coordinate: A Virtual Classroom Management Tool For Large Computer Science Courses Using Discord
Papers
Cameron Brown University of Florida, Laura Cruz Castro University of Florida
11:03
18m
Talk
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
18m
Talk
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
18m
Talk
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