Assistant Dashboard Plus – Enhancing an Existing Instructor Dashboard with Difficulty Detection and GPT-based Code Clustering

As interest in programming as a major grows, instructors must accommodate more students in their programming courses. One particularly challenging aspect of this growth is providing quality assistance to students during in-class and out-of-class programming exercises. Prior work proposes using instructor dashboards to help instructors combat these challenges. Further, the introduction of ChatGPT represents an exciting avenue to assist instructors with programming exercises but needs a delivery method for this assistance. We propose a revision of a current instructor dashboard Assistant Dashboard Plus that extends an existing dashboard with two new features: (a) identifying students in difficulty so that instructors can effectively assist them, and (b) providing instructors with pedagogically relevant groupings of students' exercise solutions with similar implementations so that instructors can provide overlapping code style feedback to students within the same group. For difficulty detection, it uses a state-of-the-art algorithm for which a visualization has not been created. For code clustering, it uses GPT. We present a first-pass implementation of this dashboard.