An Interactive Learning Environment for Program Design

Abstract

Program design skills can be effectively acquired by following an explicit guideline that systematizes the process of designing programs. While such guidelines exist, novice students often struggle to follow them without instructor support. We propose an interactive learning environment for practicing program design based on the design recipe. Backed by an LLM, the environment guides the student through the design process via conversations in natural language, while automatically generating code and feedback based on the student's responses. In this paper, we describe the design of the environment and report the results of a user study, through which we observed both the flexibility and challenges of our LLM-based approach.