ProPl Homepage
ProPl ("PROgram PLanner", pronounced pro-PELL) is a dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system for beginning programming being developed at the University of Pittsburgh by H. Chad Lane and Kurt VanLehn. 

Students engage in natural language dialogue with ProPl aimed at helping them understand and plan their programs before they attempt to write them.  The pedagogical goal is to model and support the cognitive problem solving activities that novice programmers are known to generally underestimate or even bypass altogether.
Links

Try ProPl

Coached Program Planning Corpus

Screenshots
(click on thumbnails for actual size images)
ProPl Opening
Startup
 ProPl w/Notes screenGoal Screen ProPl w/Pseudocode screenPseudocode Screen
     
Publications

Lane, H. Chad & Kurt VanLehn. An Intelligent Tutoring System for Beginning Programmers, To appear in Proceedings of the 17th International FLAIRS Conference, Miami Beach, FL, May 2004.

Lane, H. Chad.  Preventive Tutoring in Programming:  An Intelligent Tutoring System for Novice Program Design.  Dissertation Proposal, University of Pittsburgh, October 2003.  [pdf]

Lane, H. Chad & Kurt VanLehn. Coached Program Planning:  Dialogue-Based Support for Novice Program Design, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '03), Reno, NV, 148-152. [pdf]

last updated 1/19/04