Ask-Elle: an Adaptable Programming Tutor for Haskell Giving Automated Feedback

Abstract

Ask-Elle is a tutor for learning the higher-order, strongly-typed functional programming language Haskell. It supports the stepwise development of Haskell programs by verifying the correctness of incomplete programs, and by providing hints. Programming exercises are added to Ask-Elle by providing a task description for the exercise, one or more model solutions, and properties that a solution should satisfy. The properties and model solutions can be annotated with feedback messages, and the amount of flexibility that is allowed in student solutions can be adjusted.The main contribution of our work is the design of a tutor that combines (1) the incremental development of di↵erent solutions in various forms to a programming exercise with (2) automated feedback and (3) teacher-specified programming exercises, solutions, and properties. The main functionality is obtained by means of strategy-based model tracing and property-based testing. We have tested the feasibility of our approach in several experiments, in which we analyse both intermediate and final student solutions to programming exercises, amongst others.

Improving marking efficiency for longer programming solutions based on a semi‐automated assessment approach

“…Ref. [13] state that a small sample size (5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20) is sufficient for usability assessment and [7] highlights that researchers can collect valuable results using a minimum of five participants (subject experts) in a main experiment. Furthermore, [20] used five subject experts in order to provide feedback for programming solutions in their main experiment.…”

<uri>Jutge.org</uri>: Characteristics and Experiences

“…Nevertheless, the feedback provided by Jutge.org (see Sections 3 and 4) supports self-learning of programming up to a certain extent. In contrast, various feedback-based AIsupported tutoring approaches exist [4,15,24,32]. Most of them use AI techniques to give examples, provide simulations, promote incremental or stage by stage programming and facilitate dialogues between students and human tutors.…”

An Extensible Domain-Specific Language for Describing Problem-Solving Procedures

“…The Ask-Elle programming tutor [6] for Haskell was developed to help students with writing typical beginner's programs by giving feedback and hints (see Figure 2). Students can use holes (?)…”