Investigating the Use of AI-Generated Exercises for Beginner and Intermediate Programming Courses: A ChatGPT Case Study

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly used in education and supports teachers in creating educational material and students in their learning progress. AI- driven learning support has recently been further strengthened by the release of ChatGPT, in which users can retrieve expla- nations for various concepts in a few minutes through chat. However, to what extent the use of AI models, such as ChatGPT, is suitable for the creation of didactically and content-wise good exercises for programming courses is not yet known. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the use of AI-generated exercises for beginner and intermediate programming courses in higher education using ChatGPT. We created 12 exercise sheets with ChatGPT for a beginner to intermediate programming course focusing on the objects-first approach. We report our process, prompts, and experience using ChatGPT for this task and outline good practices we identified. The generated exercises are assessed and revised, primarily using ChatGPT, until they met the requirements of the programming course. We assessed the quality of these exercises by using them in our course as external teaching assignment at the University of Education Ludwigsburg and let the students evaluate them. Results indicate the quality of the generated exercises and the time-saving for creating them using ChatGPT. However, our experience showed that while it is fast to generate a good version of an exercise, almost every exercise requires minor manual changes to improve its quality.

近年来，人工智能（Artificial Intelligence）在教育领域的应用愈发广泛，既可辅助教师开发教学素材，亦能为学生的学习进程提供支持。随着ChatGPT的推出，人工智能驱动的学习支持得到进一步强化——用户可通过聊天交互在数分钟内获取各类概念的解释。然而，诸如ChatGPT这类人工智能模型，在多大程度上适用于为编程课程制作教学规范且内容精良的习题，目前尚无定论。
因此，本研究针对高等教育阶段的入门级与进阶级编程课程，探究利用ChatGPT生成人工智能习题的实践效果。本研究针对以面向对象先行教学法（objects-first approach）为核心教学理念的入门至进阶级编程课程，使用ChatGPT生成了12份习题集。本研究记录了利用ChatGPT完成该任务的全过程、提示词（prompts）及相关实践经验，并梳理了总结出的最佳实践方案。生成的习题经多次评估与修订（主要依托ChatGPT完成），直至符合该编程课程的教学要求。本研究将这些习题作为外部教学任务，在路德维希堡教育大学（University of Education Ludwigsburg）的课程中投入使用，以此评估习题质量，并邀请学生对习题进行评价。
研究结果表明，使用ChatGPT生成习题不仅能保障习题质量，还可大幅缩减习题制作的耗时。但本研究的实践经验也显示，尽管生成优质习题的速度较快，但几乎每份习题都需要进行少量人工调整，以进一步提升其质量。