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:
Four Papers Accepted at EDM21
Four papers are accepted at EDM21 in Paris, France. The topics of the papers cover student sub-goal detection, student performance prediction, bug detection, and detection of progress/struggling moments in CS courses for novice programmers.
Paper Accepted to LAK’21
Yang will be presenting a paper “Toward Semi-Automatic Misconception Discovery Using Code Embeddings” this year at LAK. The paper uses deep learning methods to extract embedding vectors from student code submissions in an introductory programming class in a US university, and use these embeddings to detect possible misconceptions by clustering them in the vector space. […]