CRII: CHS: Designing Scalable Help Tools for Programming Courses

对编程技能的需求不断增长，导致传统和在线编程课程的新学习者大量涌入。然而，提供有效的个性化帮助是具有挑战性的，尤其是在线帮助。视频聊天等同步工具支持交互式帮助，但限制了日程安排的灵活性，这是在线课程的一个关键优势。讨论论坛等异步工具提供了灵活性，允许学生从之前的问题中学习，但交互性较差，并且丢失了关于学习者问题的重要上下文信息。该项目旨在设计、构建和测试“半同步”工具，以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，并让教师形成更完整的问题图景，从而改进他们的答案，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行而变化，这应该帮助其他学习者更有效地利用先前的问题。构建和测试这些工具将提高关于如何开发可扩展的协作系统、有用的信息库和更有效的编程课程支持资源的知识。此外，它将对软件教育产生实际影响，特别是对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获益最多。该项目是围绕一个名为chat.codes的现有原型半同步工具的发展和评估来组织的。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，并开发工具来可视化代码在帮助会话期间如何随着会话的转变而变化。第二种方法涉及开发工具来存档、搜索和查看基于特定讨论主题、代码关键字或讲师创建的标记的过去的对话。评估分为四个主要阶段。第一个是一个一小时的实验室研究，让学生和老师在模拟编程任务上配对，要求学生从老师那里学习一个新的概念，旨在评估聊天的可用性。与其他同步帮助系统相关的代码。第二个是一个实验室研究，用于测试归档、搜索和可视化特性，给学生分配一个编程问题，并让他们访问第一个实验中的帮助会话，但没有现场指导，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。两项研究的结果都将用于改善聊天。代码，然后将作为远程支持工具部署在两个学期的大型现场本科编程入门课程中。这种部署将是开放式的，不要求学生和教师使用该工具，但将鼓励他们这样做；项目团队将使用采访的组合，要求用户比较聊天。代码到其他支持工具，以及日志帮助会话的分析，以更好地理解集成代码和聊天元素带来的优点和缺点。然后，该团队将开发该工具的最终版本，该版本将与现有的在线编程课程一起部署。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.