CodeHelp is an Automated Teaching Assistant
for Coding and Computer Science.
Ask it...
... how to start writing a program.
... to explain a confusing error message.
... why your code isn't working correctly.
... how to use a specific feature of your current language or framework.
... a conceptual question about your course content.
For Instructors
1. Q&A Queries — CodeHelp helps your students without writing code for them. It is made specifically to guide and explain but not provide solution code.
- Accessible Support — It is always available, whenever your students are working, with immediate responses.
- Tailored Responses — You can provide context to tailor responses to your class or even individual assignments, matching your students' needs and exactly what they are working on.
- Valuable Insights — Quickly see where your students are having trouble and what they're asking.
- Low Cost — Each student query costs roughly US$0.01 (see costs below).
- Simple Integration — CodeHelp easily fits into any existing course as a complement to existing support systems.
2. Focused TutorsNEW — You can quickly design and deploy tutors (chatbots) that follow a plan of topics, learning objectives, and assessment questions specified by you.
- Highly-relevant — Encode your expertise and knowledge of your students and learning context into the plan.
- Consistent — Every student's chat follows the same structure, while still adapting to their specific responses.
- Assessable — Easily assessed for the students' engagement and demonstration of understanding with quick skims of their responses.
- Potential uses:
- Low-stakes assessments following a reading to incentivize completing the reading and to reinforce the material before coming to class.
- Reinforce topics and material that you want your students to practice more than you have time for in class.
- Provide custom tutors on the fly to individual students as you see specific needs arise.
Access and Sharing
CodeHelp is shared with everyone in your class with a simple link. There are two options:
Request an LMS Connection
to connect from an LMS like Canvas, Moodle, etc.
- Students and instructors sign in automatically (no separate login) via a link from your course page.
- Takes some time to set up, and may require support from your LMS administrator.
- You share an access link to join the class.
- Students sign in using a Google, GitHub, or Microsoft account.
- Can be set up in less than ten minutes.
The documentation provides more details.
Costs
CodeHelp itself does not take payment, but the large language models it uses are not free. We will ask you to provide an LLM provider API key to be used for your students' queries.
Costs are low: For example, the OpenAI and Google models that are most appropriate for use in CodeHelp will cost roughly US$0.01 or less for each Q&A query. If your students use CodeHelp regularly and average 50 queries each over a semester (higher than the average we've observed), your total costs would be roughly $0.50 per student or less. See the models documentation for more details.
The costs of tutor chats are highly variable, depending on the length of the chat. A half-hour chat may be very roughly five to ten times the cost of one Q&A query.
References
[1]
CodeHelp: Using Large Language Models with Guardrails for Scalable Support in Programming Classes.
Mark Liffiton, Brad Sheese, Jaromir Savelka, and Paul Denny. 2023.
In Proceedings of the 23rd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '23). DOI: 10.1145/3631802.3631830
[2]
Patterns of Student Help-Seeking When Using a Large Language Model-Powered Programming Assistant.
Brad Sheese, Mark Liffiton, Jaromir Savelka, and Paul Denny. 2024.
In Proceedings of the 26th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE '24). DOI: 10.1145/3636243.3636249