Investigating the Use of AI-Generated Exercises for Beginner and Intermediate Programming Courses: A ChatGPT Case Study

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used in education and supports teachers in creating educational material and students in their learning progress. AI- driven learning support has recently been further strengthened by the release of ChatGPT, in which users can retrieve expla- nations for various concepts in a few minutes through chat. However, to what extent the use of AI models, such as ChatGPT, is suitable for the creation of didactically and content-wise good exercises for programming courses is not yet known. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the use of AI-generated exercises for beginner and intermediate programming courses in higher education using ChatGPT. We created 12 exercise sheets with ChatGPT for a beginner to intermediate programming course focusing on the objects-first approach. We report our process, prompts, and experience using ChatGPT for this task and outline good practices we identified. The generated exercises are assessed and revised, primarily using ChatGPT, until they met the requirements of the programming course. We assessed the quality of these exercises by using them in our course as external teaching assignment at the University of Education Ludwigsburg and let the students evaluate them. Results indicate the quality of the generated exercises and the time-saving for creating them using ChatGPT. However, our experience showed that while it is fast to generate a good version of an exercise, almost every exercise requires minor manual changes to improve its quality.

近年来，人工智能（AI）在教育领域的应用愈发广泛，不仅可辅助教师开发教学素材，还能助力学生推进学习进程。随着ChatGPT的推出，人工智能驱动的学习支持工具近期得到进一步强化——用户可通过聊天交互在数分钟内获取各类学术概念的释义。然而，诸如ChatGPT这类AI模型，是否适配编程课程中符合教学规范且内容优质的习题开发，目前尚无定论。为此，本文针对高等教育阶段的入门与进阶编程课程，探究使用ChatGPT生成AI习题的实践效果。我们依托ChatGPT，为聚焦对象优先教学法（objects-first approach）的入门至进阶编程课程，开发了12份习题集。本文详述了使用ChatGPT完成该任务的全流程、提示词（prompt）以及实践经验，并梳理总结了我们所发现的优质实践范式。生成的习题主要以ChatGPT为工具进行评估与修订，直至其符合该编程课程的教学要求。我们将这些习题作为课外教学任务，应用于路德维希堡教育大学（University of Education Ludwigsburg）的课程中，以此评估习题质量，并邀请学生对习题进行评价。研究结果显示，ChatGPT生成的习题质量达标，且可显著节省习题开发的时间成本。不过，我们的实践经验表明：尽管生成优质习题的速度较快，但几乎每道习题都需要进行少量人工调整，才能进一步提升其质量。