CRII: CHS: Designing Scalable Help Tools for Programming Courses

对编程技能不断增长的需求导致了传统和在线编程课程的新学习者涌入。然而，提供有效的个性化帮助是具有挑战性的，特别是在线。视频聊天等同步工具支持交互式帮助，但限制了调度灵活性，这是在线课程的一个关键优势。异步工具，如讨论论坛，提供了灵活性，并允许学生从以前的问题，但互动性较低，失去了重要的上下文信息的学习者的问题。 这个项目旨在设计、构建和测试“半同步”工具，以联合收割机结合两种帮助风格的优点。这个想法是，捕捉程序代码和输出的快照应该允许学习者提出更清晰的问题，并让教师形成一个更完整的问题，应该改善他们的答案，同时将聊天功能与代码集成，并跟踪代码如何随着讨论的进展而变化，应该帮助其他学习者更有效地利用以前的问题。 构建和测试这些工具将有助于了解如何开发可扩展的协作系统、有用的信息库以及更有效的编程课程支持资源。 此外，它将对软件教育产生实际影响，特别是对于社会经济地位较低的学生，他们可以从在线课程的更好支持中受益最多。 在发展方面，有两项主要活动。 第一个是将版本跟踪与现有的聊天界面集成在一起，并开发工具来可视化代码如何在帮助会话期间随着会话轮沿着变化。 第二个是开发工具，根据特定的讨论主题、代码关键字或编辑器创建的标签来存档、搜索和查看过去的对话。 评价分为四个主要阶段。 第一个是一个小时的实验室研究，学生和教师在模拟编程任务上配对，要求学生从教师那里学习一个新概念，旨在评估chat.codes相对于其他同步帮助系统的可用性。 第二个是实验室研究，以测试存档，搜索和可视化功能，分配学生到一个编程问题，并让他们访问第一个实验中的帮助会话，但不是现场教师，以查看存档的对话如何帮助解决编程问题并传达基本概念。 这两项研究的结果将用于改进chat.codes，然后将其部署为两个学期的远程支持工具，用于大型的面对面介绍性本科编程课程。 这种部署将是开放式的，学生和教师将不被要求使用该工具，但将鼓励他们这样做;项目团队将使用访谈的组合，他们要求用户将chat.codes与其他支持工具进行比较，沿着对记录的帮助会话的分析，以更好地了解集成代码和聊天元素所带来的优势和劣势。 这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The growing demand for programming skills has led to an influx of new learners in both traditional and online programming courses. However, it is challenging to provide effective personalized help, particularly online. Synchronous tools such as video chat enable interactive help but limit scheduling flexibility, which is a key advantage of online courses. Asynchronous tools such as discussion forums provide flexibility and allow students to learn from prior questions but are less interactive and lose important contextual information about the learner's question. This project aims to design, build, and test "semi-synchronous" tools to combine the best of both help styles. The idea is that capturing snapshots of the program's code and output should allow learners to ask clearer questions and let instructors form a more complete picture of the problem that should improve their answers, while integrating chat features with the code and tracking how code changes as the discussion progresses should help other learners make more effective use of prior questions. Building and testing these tools will advance knowledge about how to develop scalable collaborative systems, useful information repositories, and more effective support resources for programming courses. Further, it will have practical impacts on software education, particularly for students with lower socioeconomic status who could benefit most from better support in online courses.The project is organized around the evolution and evaluation of an existing prototype semi-synchronous tool called chat.codes. On the development side, there are two major activities. The first is integrating version tracking with the existing chat interface and developing tools to visualize how code changes along with conversational turns during a help session. The second involves developing tools to archive, search, and view past conversations based on specific discussion topics, code keywords, or instructor-created tags. The evaluation has four main phases. The first is a one-hour lab study pairing students and instructors on simulated programming tasks that require students to learn a new concept from the instructor, aimed at evaluating the usability of chat.codes relative to other synchronous help systems. The second is a lab study to test the archiving, search, and visualization features, assigning students to a programming problem and giving them access to the help sessions from the first experiment but not a live instructor to see how well the archived conversations both help solve the programming problems and convey the underlying concepts. Results from both studies will be used to improve chat.codes, which will then be deployed as a remote support tool for two semesters in a large in-person introductory undergraduate programming course. This deployment will be open-ended and students and instructors will not be required to use the tool but will be encouraged to do so; the project team will use a combination of interviews where they ask users to compare chat.codes to other support tools, along with analysis of logged help sessions, to better understand the strengths and weaknesses that come with integrating the code and chat elements. The team will then develop a final version of the tool that will be deployed alongside existing online programming courses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.