About
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About:We are building the Pseudocode
Tutor, a
dialogue-based intelligent tutoring system designed to support students
during the early stages of (structured) program development. The
pedagogical aim is to help novices understand and solve a problem in
their own words by writing pseudocode (a subset of English that has
been formalized to be similar to a high-level computer language) before
attempting to write an actual computer program. We have named
this style of tutoring Coached
Program Planning (CPP). The technological aim of the
project is to build a system capable of understanding the sometimes
vague, imprecise, and disjointed language of novices and interactively
supporting them as they build and refine their pseudocode. We have completed a human-to-human study of CPP and found that students who
underwent CPP displayed more mature programming behavior in a post-test
than those who did not. They produced more within-program
comments, committed fewer structural (indentation) mistakes, and
exhibited less erratic programming behavior when writing their actual
program code. Early analyses of the human-to-human corpus have revealed that CPP dialogues follow a clear 4-step pattern consisting of the tutor repeatedly asking the student to (1) identify a programming goal, (2) describe a technique for attaining this goal, (3) suggest pseudocode steps that attain the goal, and finally (4) place the steps appropriately within the pseudocode. At this time, we have a simplified version of the system that uses keywords for understanding and follows this 4-step pattern strictly. We are now investigating ways of incorporating more intelligent understanding, dialogue, and tutoring techniques into the system. People:
Publications:
Sponsors & Affiliations:
For problems or questions regarding this page, contact H. Chad Lane
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