Computing students increasingly rely on generative AI tools for programming assistance, often without formal instruction or guidance. This highlights a need to teach students how to effectively interact with AI models, particularly through natural language prompts, to generate and critically evaluate code for solving computational tasks. To address this, we developed a novel platform for prompt programming that enables authentic dialogue-based interactions, supports problems involving multiple interdependent functions, and offers on-request execution of generated code. Data analysis from over 900 students in an introductory programming course revealed high engagement, with the majority of prompts occurring within multi-turn dialogues. Problems with multiple interdependent functions encouraged iterative refinement, with progression graphs highlighting several common strategies. Students were highly selective about the code they chose to test, suggesting that on-request execution of generated code promoted critical thinking. Given the growing importance of learning dialogue-based programming with AI, we provide this tool as a publicly accessible resource, accompanied by a corpus of programming problems for educational use.

The introduction of generative pre-trained models, like GPT-4, has introduced a phenomenon known as prompt engineering, whereby model users repeatedly write and revise prompts while trying to achieve a task. Using these AI models for intelligent features in software applications require using APIs that are controlled through developer-written prompts. These prompts have powered AI experiences in popular software products, potentially reaching millions of users. Despite the growing impact of prompt-powered software, little is known about its development process and its relationship to programming. In this work, we argue that some forms of prompts are programs, and that the development of prompts is a distinct phenomenon in programming. We refer to this phenomenon as prompt programming. To this end, we develop an understanding of prompt programming using Straussian grounded theory through interviews with 20 developers engaged in prompt development across a variety of contexts, models, domains, and prompt complexities. Through this study, we contribute 14 observations about prompt programming. For example, rather than building mental models of code, prompt programmers develop mental models of the FM's behavior on the prompt and its unique qualities by interacting with the model. While prior research has shown that experts have well-formed mental models, we find that prompt programmers who have developed dozens of prompts, each with many iterations, still struggle to develop reliable mental models. This contributes to a rapid and unsystematic development process. Taken together, our observations indicate that prompt programming is significantly different from traditional software development, motivating the creation of tools to support prompt programming. Our findings have implications for software engineering practitioners, educators, and researchers.

Learning new programming skills requires tailored guidance. With the emergence of advanced Natural Language Generation models like the ChatGPT API, there is now a possibility of creating a convenient and personalized tutoring system with AI for computer science education. This paper presents GPTutor, a ChatGPT-powered programming tool, which is a Visual Studio Code extension using the ChatGPT API to provide programming code explanations. By integrating Visual Studio Code API, GPTutor can comprehensively analyze the provided code by referencing the relevant source codes. As a result, GPTutor can use designed prompts to explain the selected code with a pop-up message. GPTutor is now published at the Visual Studio Code Extension Marketplace, and its source code is openly accessible on GitHub. Preliminary evaluation indicates that GPTutor delivers the most concise and accurate explanations compared to vanilla ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Moreover, the feedback from students and teachers indicated that GPTutor is user-friendly and can explain given codes satisfactorily. Finally, we discuss possible future research directions for GPTutor. This includes enhancing its performance and personalization via further prompt programming, as well as evaluating the effectiveness of GPTutor with real users.

Prevailing methods for mapping large generative language models to supervised tasks may fail to sufficiently probe models' novel capabilities. Using GPT-3 as a case study, we show that 0-shot prompts can significantly outperform few-shot prompts. We suggest that the function of few-shot examples in these cases is better described as locating an already learned task rather than meta-learning. This analysis motivates rethinking the role of prompts in controlling and evaluating powerful language models. In this work, we discuss methods of prompt programming, emphasizing the usefulness of considering prompts through the lens of natural language. We explore techniques for exploiting the capacity of narratives and cultural anchors to encode nuanced intentions and techniques for encouraging deconstruction of a problem into components before producing a verdict. Informed by this more encompassing theory of prompt programming, we also introduce the idea of a metaprompt that seeds the model to generate its own natural language prompts for a range of tasks. Finally, we discuss how these more general methods of interacting with language models can be incorporated into existing and future benchmarks and practical applications.