Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI

• Main Authors: Denny, Paul, Prather, James, Becker, Brett A, Finnie-Ansley, James, Hellas, Arto, Leinonen, Juho, Luxton-Reilly, Andrew, Reeves, Brent N, Santos, Eddie Antonio, Sarsa, Sami
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 05.06.2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science - Computers and Society; Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.02608

The computing education community has a rich history of pedagogical innovation designed to support students in introductory courses, and to support teachers in facilitating student learning. Very recent advances in artificial intelligence have resulted in code generation models that can produce source code from natural language problem descriptions -- with impressive accuracy in many cases. The wide availability of these models and their ease of use has raised concerns about potential impacts on many aspects of society, including the future of computing education. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and opportunities such models present to computing educators, with a focus on introductory programming classrooms. We summarize the results of two recent articles, the first evaluating the performance of code generation models on typical introductory-level programming problems, and the second exploring the quality and novelty of learning resources generated by these models. We consider likely impacts of such models upon pedagogical practice in the context of the most recent advances at the time of writing.