Saad Nizamani

Nolan Platt, Sehrish Nizamani, Alp Tural et al.

Understanding student engagement usually requires time-consuming manual observation or invasive recording that raises privacy concerns. We present a privacy-preserving pipeline that analyzes classroom videos to extract insights about student attention, without storing any identifiable footage. Our system runs on a single GPU, using OpenPose for skeletal extraction and Gaze-LLE for visual attention estimation. Original video frames are deleted immediately after pose extraction, thus only geometric coordinates (stored as JSON) are retained, ensuring compliance with FERPA. The extracted pose and gaze data is processed by QwQ-32B-Reasoning, which performs zero-shot analysis of student behavior across lecture segments. Instructors access results through a web dashboard featuring attention heatmaps and behavioral summaries. Our preliminary findings suggest that LLMs may show promise for multimodal behavior understanding, although they still struggle with spatial reasoning about classroom layouts. We discuss these limitations and outline directions for improving LLM spatial comprehension in educational analytics contexts.

Sehrish Basir Nizamani, Zannah Ziew, Saad Nizamani et al.

As large language models (LLMs) become common in computing courses, we need to understand how the social setting shapes how students use them. This paper reports findings from a semester-long study of 96 undergraduate students who completed six assignments, alternating between individual homework and team project milestones. We tracked LLM usage, prompting habits, and how students verified AI-generated output across all six assignments. LLM usage dropped by 42.7 percentage points when students moved from individual work to their first team milestone, then partly recovered in later team tasks. Students also wrote fewer and simpler prompts, used fewer intentional prompting strategies, and checked LLM output less carefully. The share of students who ran tests on AI-generated code fell by 19.4 percentage points during team assignments and never fully rebounded. A within-student analysis found that 18.9% of students who consistently used LLMs on their own stopped using them entirely in teams, while only 3.2% went the other direction. These results suggest that collaborative context is associated with reduced deliberate LLM engagement beyond what task type alone can explain. The moment students form teams appears to be a critical and currently unsupported turning point in computing course design.