The Help through INTelligent Support (HINTS) Lab, directed by Dr. Thomas Price, works to develop learning environments that automatically support students with AI and data-driven help features. With a focus on computing education, our goal is to reimagine programming environments as adaptive, interactive systems that help students to pursue learning goals that are meaningful to them. We believe that every student should be able to learn computing with the support they need to be successful, working on projects that match their values and interests. Our research emphasizes practical methods that can scale to new classrooms and contexts, without placing additional burden on instructors. Examples of our research include:
- Generating data-driven programming help, such as hints and worked examples
- Developing standards for benchmarking the quality of data-driven support
- Evaluating the impact of programming support in classroom and lab studies
- Understanding how programmers seek and use help from computers and humans
- Enhancing block-based and novice programming environments that enable creative computation
Recent News and Publications:
Paper Accepted to SIGCSE’20
Emma will be presenting a paper “Crescendo: Engaging Students to Self-Paced Programming Practices” this year at SIGCSE. Crescendo is a programming practice system that help students practice isolated programming concepts one at a time, in a block-based programming environment (Snap!). It uses Parsons problems to reduce problem complexity, Use-Modify-Create task progressions to scaffold a programming […]
Two Papers Accepted To EDM’19 in Montreal
We’ll be presenting two papers at EDM this year. The first, “Toward Data-Driven Example Feedback for Novice Programming,” explores generating adaptive example-based feedback, which presents a partial solution to a programming problem when a student is stuck. His results suggest that by leveraging student data, we can generate higher-quality, more adaptive examples than just using […]