6 papers
Commenting with Copilot: A Taxonomy and Multi-Year Analysis of Student Code-Generation Specifications
Nasser Giacaman, Valerio Terragni, Paul Denny +1
As AI code tools become integrated into programming environments, students increasingly describe intended behavior in natural language and rely on these tools to generate code, shi…
Reshaping Undergraduate Computer Science Education in the Generative AI Era
Yi-Chieh Lee, Nattapat Boonprakong, Yugin Tan +20
Generative AI represents a turning point for Computer Science (CS) education. In recent decades, post-secondary CS education has largely focused on what has been seen as practical…
Playsemble: Learning Low-Level Programming Through Interactive Games
Elliott Wen, Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly +5
Teaching assembly programming is a fundamental component of undergraduate computer science education, yet many students struggle with its abstract and low-level concepts. Existing…
Systematically Thinking about the Complexity of Code Structuring Exercises at Introductory Level
Georgiana Haldeman, Peter Ohmann, Paul Denny
Decomposition and abstraction is an essential component of computational thinking, yet it is not always emphasized in introductory programming courses. In addition, as generative A…
Counting the Trees in the Forest: Evaluating Prompt Segmentation for Classifying Code Comprehension Level
David H. Smith, Max Fowler, Paul Denny +1
Reading and understanding code are fundamental skills for novice programmers, and especially important with the growing prevalence of AI-generated code and the need to evaluate its…
ReDefining Code Comprehension: Function Naming as a Mechanism for Evaluating Code Comprehension
David H. Smith, Max Fowler, Paul Denny +1
"Explain in Plain English" (EiPE) questions are widely used to assess code comprehension skills but are challenging to grade automatically. Recent approaches like Code Generation B…