Expert-Generated and Auto-Generated Socratic Tutoring Systems For Code Comprehension

Programming skills are a vital part of many disciplines but can be challenging to teach and learn. Thus, the programming courses are considered difficult and a major stumbling block. To overcome these challenges, students could benefit from extensive individual support such as tutoring, but there are simply not enough qualified tutors available to meet rising demands.A potential solution is the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), which offer individualized, one-on-one instruction. Such systems can offer the support to make programming instruction more effective, scalable and reduce existing teachers\u27 workloads.This dissertation demonstrates how conversational ITSs and the Socratic method of teaching can improve a novice\u27s understanding of programming concepts and, in particular, the scaffolding of code comprehension processes. Furthermore, this work provides a novel method to automatically author a Socratic dialogue-based ITS. Indeed, two major outcomes of this work are a Socratic dialogue-based ITS and an automated dialogue authoring tool, which generates full Socratic dialogue from Java source code.The key objectives of this dissertation were, first, to determine whether the Socratic method would be effective at eliciting learners to engage in self-explanations with the help of the Socratic Tutor ITS and, second, to assess the quality of Socratic Author\u27s auto-generated tutorial dialogue. Thus, the work presented here sought to answer two main research questions: (1) can a Socratic ITS lead to improved code comprehension? and (2) to what extent can Socratic dialogue be generated automatically?In sum, this research helps establish a relationship between code comprehension and the use of the Socratic method in learning computer programming. Furthermore, the work introduces a novel approach for generating Socratic dialogue from source code with examples for the Java programming language. The auto-authoring tool could help teachers and ITS developers create tutorial dialogues automatically from Java code without requiring nondomain knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, no such auto-generation of tutorial dialogues from source code has been done before and thus constituting a premiere

Applying digital content management to support localisation

The retrieval and presentation of digital content such as that on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a substantial area of research. While recent years have seen huge expansion in the size of web-based archives that can be searched efficiently by commercial search engines, the presentation of potentially relevant content is still limited to ranked document lists represented by simple text snippets or image keyframe surrogates. There is expanding interest in techniques to personalise the presentation of content to improve the richness and effectiveness of the user experience. One of the most significant challenges to achieving this is the increasingly multilingual nature of this data, and the need to provide suitably localised responses to users based on this content. The Digital Content Management (DCM) track of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) is seeking to develop technologies to support advanced personalised access and presentation of information by combining elements from the existing research areas of Adaptive Hypermedia and Information Retrieval. The combination of these technologies is intended to produce significant improvements in the way users access information. We review key features of these technologies and introduce early ideas for how these technologies can support localisation and localised content before concluding with some impressions of future directions in DCM

Semi-automatic assessment of students' graph-based diagrams

Diagrams are increasingly used in many design methods, and are being taught in a variety of contexts in higher education such as database conceptual design or software design in computer science. They are an important part of many assessments. Currently computer aided assessments are widely used for multiple choice questions. They lack the ability to assess a student’s knowledge in a more comprehensive way, which is required for diagram-type student work. The aim of this research is to develop a semi-automatic assessment framework, which enables the use of computer to support the assessment process of diagrammatic solutions, with the focus of ensuring the consistency of grades and feedback on solutions. A novel trace model, that captures design traces of student solutions, was developed as a part of the framework and was used to provide the matching criteria for grouping the solutions. A new marking style, partial marking, was developed to mark these solution groups manually. The Case-Based Reasoning method is utilised in the framework to mark some of the groups automatically. A guideline for scenario writing was proposed to increase the efficiency of automatic marking. A prototype diagram editor, a marking tool and scenario writing environment were implemented for the proposed framework in order to demonstrate proof of concept. The results of experiments show that the framework is feasible to use in the formative assessment and it provides consistent marking and personalised feedback to the students. The framework also has the potential to significantly reduce the time and effort required by the examiner to mark student diagrams. Although the constructed framework was specifically used for the assessment of database diagrams, the framework is generic enough to be used for other types of graph-based diagram

Design and implementation of a generalised computer aided learning system

This thesis surveys the development of computer aided learning and outlines the tools that are used for creating computer aided learning systems. A project to create and port over a computer aided learning system from a VAX 11/750 to a PDF model 11/44 based on the UNIX operating system is described. The computer aided learning system makes extensive use of existing software tools available on UNIX and is hence named CALUNIX for Computer Aided Learning on UNIX

Improving Introductory Computer Science Education with DRaCO

Today, many introductory computer science courses rely heavily on a specific programming language to convey fundamental programming concepts. For beginning students, the cognitive capacity required to operate with the syntactic forms of this language may overwhelm their ability to formulate a solution to a program. We recognize that the introductory computer science courses can be more effective if they convey fundamental concepts without requiring the students to focus on the syntax of a programming language. To achieve this, we propose a new teaching method based on the Design Recipe and Code Outlining (DRaCO) processes. Our new pedagogy capitalizes on the algorithmic intuitions of novice students and provides a tool for students to externalize their intuitions using techniques they are already familiar with, rather than with the syntax of a specific programming language. We validate the effectiveness of our new pedagogy by integrating it into an existing CS1 course at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. We find that the our newly proposed pedagogy shows strong potential to improve students’ ability to program

Supporting the tutor in the design and support of adaptive e-learning

The further development and deployment of e-learning faces a number of threats. First, in order to meet the increasing demands of learners, staff have to develop and plan a wide and complex variety of learning activities that, in line with contemporary pedagogical models, adapt to the learners’ individual needs. Second, the deployment of e-learning, and therewith the freedom to design the appropriate kind of activities is bound by strict economical conditions, i.e. the amount of time available to staff to support the learning process. In this thesis two models have been developed and implemented that each address a different need. The first model covers the need to support the design task of staff, the second one the need to support the staff in supervising and giving guidance to students' learning activities. More specifically, the first model alleviates the design task by offering a set of connected design and runtime tools that facilitate adaptive e-learning. The second model alleviates the support task by invoking the knowledge and skills of fellow-students. Both models have been validated in near-real-world task settings

Easing the Creation Process of Mobile Applications for Non-Technical Users

In this day and age, the mobile phone is becoming one of the most indispensable personal computing device. People no longer use it just for communication (i.e. calling, sending messages) but also for other aspects of their lives as well. Because of this rise in demand for different and innovative applications, mobile companies (i.e. mobile handset manufacturers and mobile network providers) and organizations have realized the power of collaborative software development and have changed their business strategy. Instead of hiring specific organizations to do programming, they are now opening up their APIs and tools to allow ordinary people create their own mobile applications either for personal use or for profit. However, the problem with this approach is that there are people who might have nice ideas of their own but do not possess the technical expertise in order to create applications implementing these ideas. The goal of this research is to find ways to simplify the creation of mobile applications for non-technical people by applying model-driven software development particularly domain-specific modeling combined with techniques from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) particularly iterative, user-centered system design. As proof of concept, we concentrate on the development of applications in the domain of mHealth and use the Android Framework as the target platform for code generation. The iterative user-centered design and development of the front-end tool which is called the Mobia Modeler, led us to eventually create a tool that features a configurable-component based design and integrated modeless environment to simplify the different development tasks of end-users. The Mobia models feature both constructs specialized for specific domains (e.g. sensor component, special component ), and also those that are applicable to any type of domain (e.g. structure component, basic component ). In order to accommodate different needs of end-users, a clear separation between the front-end tools (i.e. Mobia Modeler ) and the underlying code generator (i.e. Mobia Processor ) is recommended as long as there is a consistent model in between, that serves as a bridge between the different tools