itutor

PROJECT SUMMARY

iTutor is an intelligent tutoring system that assists students in learning programming skills and serves as an alternative for tutors. Given a programming problem, iTutor accepts a tutor's solution as input and guides students in solving the programming problem by giving feedback. More specifically, iTutor identifies specific scenarios, such as the student's solution not handling negative numbers, under which the student's solution differs from the tutor's solution. iTutor targets identifying behavioral differences rather than structural differences between the two solutions. iTutor includes advanced techniques in software testing and automatically generates unit tests that can expose the behavioral differences between the tutor's and student's solutions. We are currently developing iTutor as an Eclipse plugin to assist students in learning programming skills in the Java programming language. Initially, we plan to provide feedback in the form of specific scenarios such as the student's solution not handling negative numbers. In future work, we plan to extend iTutor to adapt natural language processing techniques in order to give more constructive feedback.

PEOPLE

Faculty

Tao Xie (Principal Investigator)

Graduate Students

Yoonki Song

Kunal Taneja

Suresh Thummalapenta

Undergraduate Students

Bellanov Apilli

Shengyen Tony Chen

Travis Weston

Collaborators

Alex Orso and Wei Jin (Georgia Institute of Technology)

SOFTWARE

• iTutor for Java

PUBLICATIONS

1. Wei Jin, Alex Orso, and Tao Xie. Automated Behavioral Regression Testing. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2010), Paris, France, April 2010.[PDF][BibTeX]
2. A previous version appeared in Proceedings of WODA 2008.
   1. Kunal Taneja and Tao Xie. DiffGen: Automated Regression Unit-Test Generation. In Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2008), Short Paper, L'Aquila, Italy, pp. 407-410, September 2008. [PDF][Poster][BibTeX]

SELECTED TALK/POSTER PRESENTATIONS

1. Bellanov Apilli and Tao Xie. iTutor: Assisting Students Learning Java Programming. NCSU STARS (Students & Technology in Academia, Research and Service) Project Meeting Poster Session, Fall 2009. [Poster]
1. Tao Xie. Regression Testing and .Programming Tutoring .via Automated Testing.. CACC Proposal Presentation, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, April 2009. [Slides]
   1. Bellanov Apilli. iTutor: Assisting Students in Learning Java Programming. NCSU STARS (Students & Technology in Academia, Research and Service) Project Meeting Poster Session, Fall 2008. [Poster]

SPONSORS

National Science Foundation Award CCF-0915400, SHF Program (09/01/2009-08/31/2012), CCF-0845272, CAREER SHF Program (08/01/2009-07/31/2014), CCF-0725190, SoD Program (01/01/2008-12/31/2010)

NCSU CACC (06/10-05/11)