Prompt Programming: A Platform for Dialogue-based Computational Problem Solving with Generative AI Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pădurean, Victor-Alexandru, Denny, Paul, Gotovos, Alkis, Singla, Adish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918139559673856
author Pădurean, Victor-Alexandru
Denny, Paul
Gotovos, Alkis
Singla, Adish
author_facet Pădurean, Victor-Alexandru
Denny, Paul
Gotovos, Alkis
Singla, Adish
contents Computing students increasingly rely on generative AI tools for programming assistance, often without formal instruction or guidance. This highlights a need to teach students how to effectively interact with AI models, particularly through natural language prompts, to generate and critically evaluate code for solving computational tasks. To address this, we developed a novel platform for prompt programming that enables authentic dialogue-based interactions, supports problems involving multiple interdependent functions, and offers on-request execution of generated code. Data analysis from over 900 students in an introductory programming course revealed high engagement, with the majority of prompts occurring within multi-turn dialogues. Problems with multiple interdependent functions encouraged iterative refinement, with progression graphs highlighting several common strategies. Students were highly selective about the code they chose to test, suggesting that on-request execution of generated code promoted critical thinking. Given the growing importance of learning dialogue-based programming with AI, we provide this tool as a publicly accessible resource, accompanied by a corpus of programming problems for educational use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prompt Programming: A Platform for Dialogue-based Computational Problem Solving with Generative AI Models
Pădurean, Victor-Alexandru
Denny, Paul
Gotovos, Alkis
Singla, Adish
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computing students increasingly rely on generative AI tools for programming assistance, often without formal instruction or guidance. This highlights a need to teach students how to effectively interact with AI models, particularly through natural language prompts, to generate and critically evaluate code for solving computational tasks. To address this, we developed a novel platform for prompt programming that enables authentic dialogue-based interactions, supports problems involving multiple interdependent functions, and offers on-request execution of generated code. Data analysis from over 900 students in an introductory programming course revealed high engagement, with the majority of prompts occurring within multi-turn dialogues. Problems with multiple interdependent functions encouraged iterative refinement, with progression graphs highlighting several common strategies. Students were highly selective about the code they chose to test, suggesting that on-request execution of generated code promoted critical thinking. Given the growing importance of learning dialogue-based programming with AI, we provide this tool as a publicly accessible resource, accompanied by a corpus of programming problems for educational use.
title Prompt Programming: A Platform for Dialogue-based Computational Problem Solving with Generative AI Models
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04267