Intelligent assistant for helping students to learn programming

Students experience constant problems in their introductory programming courses. Along with difficulties to cope with abstract programming concepts students tend to experience fear and lack of motivation to learn programming. In order to make programming more interesting and to make programming concepts easier to comprehend an intelligent assistant which enables students to ask question about their programming lessons in a simple and familiar way just as they would ask the lecturer is proposed. In this way the process of getting the right information and answer gets faster and also more interesting and engaging compared to classic approach. Along with getting the desired answer faster this kind of approach increases motivation of students to spend more time in learning programming because of interesting new technology that is used as an aiding tool in their programming education. The results about students´ attitude towards such approach and its effect on students´ motivation and amount of time spent in learning are presented and discussed.