Evaluation Of Guided-Planning And Assisted-Coding With Task Relevant Dynamic Hinting

We describe a programming tutor framework that consists of two configurable components, a guided-planning component and an assisted-coding component that offers task relevant automatically-generated hints on demand to students. We evaluate the effectiveness of the new integrated planning and coding environment by comparing it to three other tutor conditions: planning-only, coding-only, and planning-only interleaved with planning-coding. We conclude that the integrated planning and coding tutor environment is more effective than tutored planning-only activities and that students make more efficient use of tutor feedback in the integrated environment than in the coding only environment.