Towards Improving Introductory Computer Programming with an ITS for Conceptual Learning

Computer programming is becoming important in almost every profession. However, programming is still difficult for students to learn. In this work, we focus on helping students acquire strong conceptual and procedural knowledge of programing. We propose to create a new Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that will support students in two types of conceptually-oriented activities: code tracing and code comprehension. Further, we propose to run a study to evaluate whether the ITS can support students’ conceptual learning and transfer to procedural learning of computer programming.