2024-08-09-tercan24a.md

title	booktitle	year	abstract	layout	series	publisher	issn	id	month	tex_title	firstpage	lastpage	page	order	cycles	bibtex_author	author	date	address	container-title	volume	genre	issued	pdf	extras
Synthesizing a Progression of Subtasks for Block-Based Visual Programming Tasks	Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence	2024	Block-based visual programming environments play an increasingly important role in introducing computing concepts to K-12 students. The open-ended and conceptual nature of these visual programming tasks make them challenging for novice programmers. A natural approach to providing assistance for problem-solving is breaking down a complex task into a progression of simpler subtasks. However, this is not trivial given that the solution codes are typically nested and have non-linear execution behavior. In this paper, we formalize the problem of synthesizing such a progression for a given reference task in a visual programming domain. We propose a novel synthesis algorithm that generates a progression of subtasks that are high-quality, well-spaced in terms of their complexity, and solving this progression leads to solving the reference task. We conduct a user study to demonstrate that our synthesized progression of subtasks can assist a novice programmer in solving tasks from the Hour of Code: Maze Challenge by Code.org.	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	tercan24a	0	Synthesizing a Progression of Subtasks for Block-Based Visual Programming Tasks	129	138	129-138	129	false	Tercan, Alperen and Ghosh, Ahana and Eniser, Hasan Ferit and Christakis, Maria and Singla, Adish	given family Alperen Tercan given family Ahana Ghosh given family Hasan Ferit Eniser given family Maria Christakis given family Adish Singla	2024-08-09		Proceedings of the 2024 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence	257	inproceedings	date-parts 2024 8 9	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v257/main/assets/tercan24a/tercan24a.pdf