Enhancing Programming eTextbooks with ChatGPT Generated Counterfactual-Thinking-Inspired Questions
This work addresses a specific issue for students in programming classes, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ideas about counterfactual thinking and applies a known AI tool to a new educational context.
The paper tackled the problem of insufficient interactivity in programming eTextbooks by proposing to enhance them with ChatGPT-generated counterfactual-thinking-inspired questions, aiming to improve student engagement and program comprehension.
Digital textbooks have become an integral part of everyday learning tasks. In this work, we consider the use of digital textbooks for programming classes. Generally, students struggle with utilizing textbooks on programming to the maximum, with a possible reason being that the example programs provided as illustration of concepts in these textbooks don't offer sufficient interactivity for students, and thereby not sufficiently motivating to explore or understand these programming examples better. In our work, we explore the idea of enhancing the navigability of intelligent textbooks with the use of ``counterfactual'' questions, to make students think critically about these programs and enhance possible program comprehension. Inspired from previous works on nudging students on counter factual thinking, we present the possibility to enhance digital textbooks with questions generated using GPT.