A Curiosity-Driven System for Developing Coding Literacy (Abstract Only)

Coding literacy is the ability to understand a written computer program and interpret its functionality and output. Literacy is a valuable skill for programmers at all levels, because understanding written code requires developing and applying mental models of program execution. Previous work has shown that explicit instruction in program literacy is beneficial for new computer science students and aids the development of algorithmic thinking. This poster summarizes the authors' work- in-progress developing COLT: the Coding Literacy Trainer, a web-based adaptive tutorial system that provides instruction in the fundamentals of coding literacy and program interpretation to new computer science students. In addition to its pedagogical applications, COLT serves as a development platform for a novel theoretical foundation for adaptive teaching systems based on the concept of intrinsic curiosity. Inspired by the work of Lee et al. in the field of developmental robotics, a curiosity-driven system explores its complete knowledge environment in way that continually maximizes its learning progress. Thus, learners are driven to explore areas where they are currently making the greatest advances, while avoiding regions of the knowledge space that are either too simple to be interesting or too challenging to be approachable at the current time. The poster summarizes the theoretical background and implementation of the COLT system in a clear, easy-to-read format. A web-based version of COLT is currently under active development and slated for an open-source release in the spring of 2016.