Synthesis of social media messages and tweets as feedback medium in introductory programming

Sonny Kabaso, Abejide Ade-Ibijola

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Social Media have been recognised as supportive tools in education for creating benefits that supplement students’ collaboration, class interactions, as well as communication between instructors and students. Active informal interaction and feedback between instructors and students outside class belong to the main reasons behind social media pedagogy. Despite the prevalence of traditional email methods of providing feedback to students, the literature shows that they do not check their emails as frequently as they check their social media accounts. In this paper we present the automatic generation of feedback messages and tweets with context-free grammars (CFG). Our system takes a class list of students and their mark sheets and automatically composes Twitter tweets concerning statistical ‘fun facts’ about programming problems, exercises, class performances, as well as private messages about individual student performances. A survey with 116 participating students showed that the majority of them would like to receive such notifications on social media rather than emails. Lecturers found our system promising, too.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICT Education - 48th Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers’ Association, SACLA 2019, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsBobby Tait, Jan Kroeze, Stefan Gruner
PublisherSpringer
Pages3-16
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030356286
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event48th Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association, SACLA 2019 - Bergville, South Africa
Duration: 15 Jul 201917 Jul 2019

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume1136 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929
ISSN (Electronic)1865-0937

Conference

Conference48th Annual Conference of the Southern African Computer Lecturers' Association, SACLA 2019
Country/TerritorySouth Africa
CityBergville
Period15/07/1917/07/19

Keywords

  • Context-free grammar
  • Introductory programming
  • Procedural generation
  • Social media
  • Tweet synthesis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science
  • General Mathematics

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