A Chatbot to Facilitate Student Learning in a Programming 1 Course: A Gendered Analysis

The programming domain is a challenging field of study for most novice programmers. Novices have to learn different skills in the Programming 1 course at the same time. This study prepared and introduced a chatbot in the course. The chatbot emphasizes syntax and semantics, problem solving strategies, course details, and common programming syntax and semantics errors. The influence of the chatbot on students' learning in the Programming 1 course was determined by performing a survey and analyzing the final grades of the course. The survey results reveal that the chatbot approach was appreciated by both female and male students in the Programming 1 course. The chatbot helped novices in comprehending the fundamental programming concepts and understanding common syntax and semantic errors. The analysis of final grades shows that female students perform well in the medium and low achiever categories, and male students show better performance in the high achiever category.