In computer science education, considering enrollments exceeding 1.000 students, educators and traditional education models face enormous challenges in providing a scalable, personalized, and compelling learning experience. Chatbots have become important facilitators in direct conversational interactions and in providing students with necessary information. An example is the chat-based virtual tutor IRIS, developed by researchers of Applied Software engineering at TUM.

Their empirical evaluation of the use of IRIS with more than 200 participants from three introductory computer science lectures shows that students perceive IRIS as effective because it understands their questions, provides relevant support, and contributes to the learning process. The findings underscore students’ appreciation for IRIS’ immediate and personalized support, though students predominantly view it as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, human tutors. Nevertheless, Iris creates a space for students to ask questions without being judged by others.

References

• Bassner, P., Frankford, E., and Krusche, S. (2024). Iris: An AI-Driven Virtual Tutor for Computer Science Education. In: Proceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 394–400. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649217.3653543
• View Post: IRIS – Towards AI-driven Interactive Learning