Invited Talk 2: Generating and Revealing Structured Variation to Help Humans Learn [Programming]

AI-assisted programming tools are rapidly being integrated into CS classrooms, without a full understanding of how it is affecting students' learning. Recent results from studying human decision-making with and without AI assistance has shown that cognitive engagement is critical for learning to occur during these interactions, and that many learners may not cognitively engage enough with the AI assistance before applying it. Prior work on cognitive forcing functions has made cognitive engagement more necessary by withholding information, for example, for greater learning effect. We instead attempt to cultivate cognitive engagement through the use of aligned, or at least alignable, differences, based on the design implications of various theories of human concept learning and related psychological studies. While we have explored this approach most thoroughly in the context of programming, it may be generalizable to many other learning tasks.