Authoring Worked Examples for Java Programming with Human-AI Collaboration

Abstract

Worked examples (solutions to typical programming problems presented as a source code in a certain language and are used to explain the topics from a programming class) are among the most popular types of learning content in programming classes. Most approaches and tools for presenting these examples to students are based on line-by-line explanations of the example code. However, instructors rarely have time to provide line-by-line explanations for a large number of examples typically used in a programming class. In this paper, we explore and assess a human-AI collaboration approach to authoring worked examples for Java programming. We introduce an authoring system for creating Java worked examples that generates a starting version of code explanations and presents it to the instructor to edit if necessary. We also present a study that assesses the quality of explanations created with this approach.