Prompt Programming: A Platform for Dialogue-based Computational Problem Solving with Generative AI Models
This addresses the problem of teaching students to use AI tools for programming in an educational context, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI-assisted learning methods.
The researchers tackled the need to teach computing students effective interaction with generative AI for programming by developing a dialogue-based platform that supports multi-function problems and on-request code execution. Analysis from over 900 students showed high engagement, with most prompts in multi-turn dialogues and selective code testing indicating critical thinking.
Computing students increasingly rely on generative AI tools for programming assistance, often without formal instruction or guidance. This highlights a need to teach students how to effectively interact with AI models, particularly through natural language prompts, to generate and critically evaluate code for solving computational tasks. To address this, we developed a novel platform for prompt programming that enables authentic dialogue-based interactions, supports problems involving multiple interdependent functions, and offers on-request execution of generated code. Data analysis from over 900 students in an introductory programming course revealed high engagement, with the majority of prompts occurring within multi-turn dialogues. Problems with multiple interdependent functions encouraged iterative refinement, with progression graphs highlighting several common strategies. Students were highly selective about the code they chose to test, suggesting that on-request execution of generated code promoted critical thinking. Given the growing importance of learning dialogue-based programming with AI, we provide this tool as a publicly accessible resource, accompanied by a corpus of programming problems for educational use.