A dialogue-based tutoring system for beginning programming
H. Chad Lane, Kurt A. VanLehn · 2004
We present a preventive model of tutoring for novice pro-gramming derived from a human corpus and describe our in-telligent tutoring system PROPL embodying that model. The system conducts natural language dialogue aimed at eliciting program design ideas from the student prior to their initial solution attempt. Students are asked to identify programming goals and how best to achieve them. Various tutoring tactics are employed to correct flawed responses and refine vague or incomplete answers. PROPL is an application of Atlas, a dialogue management system providing robust sentence-level understanding and a reactive planner to control dia-logue. A controlled evaluation is currently underway to as-sess PROPL’s impact on students ’ programming and problem decomposition skills as well as their general behaviors, be-liefs, and attitudes surrounding the tasks of programming.