Towards embedding a tutoring companion in the eclipse integrated development environment

Abstract

Programmers use Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to write and test software, and students use them while learning programming. We explore the approach of embedding a tutoring companion inside Eclipse, a popular IDE. The embedded tutoring companion aims to be comparable to having an actual teaching assistant present all the time with each student throughout a course. The embedded tutoring companion tracks student’s actions while solving a problem (coding, compiling, running) and collects metadata including the time spent, the correctness of the work, and the amount of copied or auto-generated code in the work. Then it can determine the practical understanding of the topics and concepts associated with the presented problem, it can assist the student by providing immediate feedback, and it can help instructors by reporting real-time information about students’ performance. Our companion, implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, was evaluated with undergraduate students enrolled in a Java programming course.