A Conversational Assistant on Mobile Devices for Primitive Learners of Computer Programming

According to eMarketer’s survey, the penetration rate of smart phone in Taiwan is one of the top 5 countries in the world, around 77.6% of her population in 2018. Especially among youths, almost everyone has a smartphone. They use mobile devices ubiquitously and it causes problems regarding learning in classroom. Instead of restriction of using smart phones, we encourage students to utilize the devices for learning as frequent as possible. Therefore, a conversational assistant(chatbot) based on IBM Watson Assistant and Facebook Messenger is developed to help non-technical students as they are primitive to computer programming. At the development stage, students appreciate the assistant as an “first-aid” about the course materials and suggest that it should provide more helps about programming logics. In the progress into the stage of test, we will cyclically analyze the conversations between the assistant and users and identify the improvements for better instructional design. The controlled experiment method is utilized to tell if the chatbot could improve the students’ engagements and interests to programming for the first version of chatbot.