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:
Research Fund Received from Amazon Web Services
HINTS lab has received $6,000 research credits from Amazon Web Services for the research of Representation Learning from CS Education Data. This research fund, granted to Dr. Price and Yang will be used to support intensive computing in leveraging machine learning models for CS education research topics.
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 […]