Pensieve Discuss: Scalable Small-Group CS Tutoring System with AI
This addresses the problem of providing effective and scalable small-group tutoring for CS students, representing an incremental improvement by integrating existing AI and collaboration tools.
The authors tackled the challenge of scaling small-group CS tutoring by developing Pensieve Discuss, a platform combining synchronous editing with AI tutors, which resulted in high collaboration rates, positive student feedback, and increased question volume in a deployment with 800 students.
Small-group tutoring in Computer Science (CS) is effective, but presents the challenge of providing a dedicated tutor for each group and encouraging collaboration among group members at scale. We present Pensieve Discuss, a software platform that integrates synchronous editing for scaffolded programming problems with online human and AI tutors, designed to improve student collaboration and experience during group tutoring sessions. Our semester-long deployment to 800 students in a CS1 course demonstrated consistently high collaboration rates, positive feedback about the AI tutor's helpfulness and correctness, increased satisfaction with the group tutoring experience, and a substantial increase in question volume. The use of our system was preferred over an interface lacking AI tutors and synchronous editing capabilities. Our experiences suggest that small-group tutoring sessions are an important avenue for future research in educational AI.