Programming skills are typically developed through completing various hands-on exercises. Such programming problems can be contextualized to students' interests and cultural backgrounds. Prior research in educational psychology has demonstrated that context personalization of exercises stimulates learners' situational interests and positively affects their engagement. However, creating a varied and comprehensive set of programming exercises for students to practice on is a time-consuming and laborious task for computer science educators. Previous studies have shown that large language models can generate conceptually and contextually relevant programming exercises. Thus, they offer a possibility to automatically produce personalized programming problems to fit students' interests and needs. This article reports on a user study conducted in an elective introductory programming course that included contextually personalized programming exercises created with GPT-4. The quality of the exercises was evaluated by both the students and the authors. Additionally, this work investigated student attitudes towards the created exercises and their engagement with the system. The results demonstrate that the quality of exercises generated with GPT-4 was generally high. What is more, the course participants found them engaging and useful. This suggests that AI-generated programming problems can be a worthwhile addition to introductory programming courses, as they provide students with a practically unlimited pool of practice material tailored to their personal interests and educational needs.

When General Richard D. Clarke, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), visited MIT in fall 2019, he had artificial intelligence on the mind. As the commander of a military organization tasked with advancing U.S. policy objectives as well as predicting and mitigating future security threats, he knew that the acceleration and proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies worldwide would change the landscape on which USSOCOM would have to act. Clarke met with Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and after touring multiple labs both agreed that MIT -- as a hub for AI innovation -- would be an ideal institution to help USSOCOM rise to the challenge. Thus, a new collaboration between the MIT School of Engineering, MIT Professional Education, and USSOCOM was born: a six-week AI and machine learning crash course designed for special operations personnel. "There has been tremendous growth in the fields of computing and artificial intelligence over the past few years," says Chandrakasan.