A Personalized Education Chatbot for the Novice Programmers in Action

Chatbots that utilize large language models are broadly popular these days. These chatbots and related tools are beneficial in the context of programming because they can explain solutions, provide guidance, solve simple issues, and communicate according to the user’s domain expertise. Our goal was to provide students with a chatbot that is tailored specifically for one subject, in this case Basics of Programming and Algorithmization, in order to provide guidance within the rules of our subject and information that is up-to-date and relevant. Additionally, we can tweak input parameters, data, and prompts specifically for the current week of the semester or the discussed topic. We evaluated the resulting solution using common methods like questionnaires and user testing. Experiments were performed in controlled and carefully selected groups of students with their consent and on a short-term basis.