[Digital Education Reading Group] Spring '23 First Discussion

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Rifat Sabbir Mansur

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Jan 30, 2023, 8:03:42 PM1/30/23
to Digital Education Research at VT
Hello Digital Education Group! 

I hope everyone is doing well. 

We are planning on resuming our Digital Education Reading Group for Spring '23. 
We are planning on having at least one meeting per month and discuss topics regarding Digital Education. 

Please fill in your availability here for the reading group meetings by this Friday 2/3:
WhenToMeet [Link].

In our first meeting, we plan to discuss the role of Artificial Intelligence in Computer Science education. 
We are going to discuss some AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT
Looking forward to having an interesting discussion. 

Stay healthy and safe! :) 

Best regards, 
~ Ri
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Rifat Sabbir Mansur
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ph.D. Candidate 
Dept. of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Graduate Representative, Diversity Committee, CS, Virginia Tech
President, ABS@VT, 2019-2020

Rifat Sabbir Mansur

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Feb 3, 2023, 11:55:56 AM2/3/23
to Digital Education Research at VT
Hello Digital Education Group! 

Based on the majority of votes, we are going to hold our next Reading Group meeting on the following date:
Wednesday, February 8, 2023, from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM ET 

Zoom details:
Meeting ID: 873 3155 7745
Passcode: digitaledu

We are going to discuss solving programming assignments in CS courses using AI assistance (Copilot and ChatGPT).

We will start our discussion using the following paper: 

Title: Conversing with Copilot: Exploring Prompt Engineering for Solving CS1 Problems Using Natural Language
Abstract: GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence model for automatically generating source code from natural language problem descriptions.
Since June 2022, Copilot has officially been available for free to all students as a plug-in to development environments like Visual
Studio Code. Prior work exploring OpenAI Codex, the underlying model that powers Copilot, has shown it performs well on typical
CS1 problems thus raising concerns about the impact it will have on how introductory programming courses are taught. However,
little is known about the types of problems for which Copilot does not perform well, or about the natural language interactions that a
student might have with Copilot when resolving errors. We explore these questions by evaluating the performance of Copilot on a
publicly available dataset of 166 programming problems. We find that it successfully solves around half of these problems on its very
first attempt, and that it solves 60% of the remaining problems using only natural language changes to the problem description.
We argue that this type of prompt engineering, which we believe will become a standard interaction between human and Copilot
when it initially fails, is a potentially useful learning activity that promotes computational thinking skills, and is likely to change the
nature of code writing skill development.


Hoping to see you all on Wednesday. 
Stay healthy and safe! :) 

Best regards, 
~ Ri
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Rifat Sabbir Mansur
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ph.D. Candidate 
Dept. of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Graduate Representative, Diversity Committee, CS, Virginia Tech
President, ABS@VT, 2019-2020

Cliff Shaffer

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Feb 7, 2023, 6:20:23 PM2/7/23
to Rifat Sabbir Mansur, Digital Education Research at VT
Looking forward to our discussion on CoPilot tomorrow.


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Dr. Cliff Shaffer                                               
Professor and Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies
Department of Computer Science              Phone: (540) 231-4354
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061          WWW: www.cs.vt.edu/~shaffer

Rifat Sabbir Mansur

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Feb 21, 2023, 3:18:26 PM2/21/23
to Digital Education Research at VT
Hello everyone! 

There is a recent post made by Tom Scott (tech-enthusiast) about how he prompted ChatGPT to write an automated script for him [Blog Link]. 
He made a YouTube video that explains it further [Video Link].
The interesting part is, this is a novel script that ChatGPT was able to generate based on prompt engineering. 
There were some logical errors but nothing that was difficult to solve by providing additional prompting. 

This might be interesting to the people researching on programming with the help of AI assistance tools (Copilot, ChatGPT). 

Hope this helps! :) 

Best regards, 
~ Ri
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Rifat Sabbir Mansur
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ph.D. Candidate 
Dept. of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Graduate Representative, Diversity Committee, CS, Virginia Tech
President, ABS@VT, 2019-2020
Website | LinkedIn | Skype | GitHub
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