Nudging Students Toward Better Software Engineering Behaviors

TL;DR

This paper introduces class-bot, a system that uses behavioral science principles to nudge students towards better software engineering behaviors, improving code quality and productivity in an introductory programming course.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework and system for applying behavioral nudges to enhance student programming behaviors in education.

Findings

Improved code quality among students using class-bot

Increased student productivity and engagement

Positive preliminary evaluation results

Abstract

Student experiences in large undergraduate Computer Science courses are increasingly impacted by automated systems. Bots, or agents of software automation, are useful for efficiently grading and generating feedback. Current efforts at automation in CS education focus on supporting instructional tasks, but do not address student struggles due to poor behaviors, such as procrastination. In this paper, we explore using bots to improve the software engineering behaviors of students using developer recommendation choice architectures, a framework incorporating behavioral science concepts in recommendations to improve the actions of programmers. We implemented this framework in class-bot, a novel system designed to nudge students to make better choices while working on programming assignments. This work presents a preliminary evaluation integrating this tool in an introductory programming course. Our results show that class-bot is beneficial for improving student development behaviors increasing code quality and productivity.