Prutor: A system for automated tutoring of introductory programming courses.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
COM1 Level 2
Video Conference Room, COM1-02-13
Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe Prutor (PRogramming tuTOR), a software system to help in teaching introductory programming courses. It comprises among other things, an interface where students can solve programming problems, and receive immediate feedback on their solutions while solving the problems. What makes Prutor unique is the ability to integrate feedback generation tools into the system in order to provide instant feedback. External plug-ins can be integrated into the system for simplification of tutoring tasks, such as test-case generation, grading, and feedback.
The system collects valuable data regarding how the students solve the problems, the errors they commit and other information useful for developing intelligent tools for giving feedback to students. This system thus serves as a platform for tutoring as well as data collection for researchers.
I will describe some of our experiments for automatic grading and feedback for introductory programming assignments with the data collected by Prutor.
Biodata:
Dr. Amey Karkare completed his Ph.D. from IIT Bombay in 2009 and his B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur in 1998. His areas of interest include Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Program Analysis, Compiler Optimizations, and Functional Programming. He has more than 7 years of industrial experience most of which is in the area of Compiler Optimizations. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of CSE at IIT Kanpur. He is currently the head of Computer Center and Associate Dean for Digital Infrastructure at IIT Kanpur.
Dr. Karkare received prestigious Infosys fellowship during his Ph.D., and P. K. Kelkar Young Research Fellowship at IIT Kanpur. He has been visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, and IIT Bombay.
Last few years his focus is on improving how introductory programming courses are taught. He has co-taught large online courses on programming that had registration of more than 30,000 students. The software he developed, called Prutor, is being used at several premier institutes in India like IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Goa, IISER Bhopal to name a few.