KIAAA: An AI Assistant for Teaching Programming in the Field of Automation

Especially in highly interdisciplinary fields such as automation engineering, contemporary programming education with tailored assignments and individual feedback is a major challenge for educational institutions due to the increasing number of students per teacher and the ever-increasing demand for computer science professionals. To address this gap, we present ”KIAAA” an AI Assistant for Automation Engineering Teaching, a work-in-progress approach for an integrated, customized, and AI-based learning support system for automation and programming courses based on instructor-defined course objectives. Thereby in the KIAAA system, the individual knowledge level of the students is determined and individually tailored virtual learning scenarios are generated based on the knowledge and learning profile of the students. These are iteratively adapted based on the answers given. To achieve this, KIAAA uses several AI components, a hybrid rule-based scenario generation component, a Help-DKT-based cognitive model, and a solution assessor that uses a combination of traditional code analysis methods and AI-based analyses methods for automated programming task assessment. These components are the main parts of KIAAA to generate customized programming scenarios as well as visualization and simulation based on a modern game and physics engine.