How to Teach Programming in the AI Era? Using LLMs as a Teachable Agent for Debugging

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) now excel at generative skills and can create content at impeccable speeds. However, they are imperfect and still make various mistakes. In a Computer Science education context, as these models are widely recognized as “AI pair programmers,” it becomes increasingly important to train students on evaluating and debugging the LLM-generated code. In this work, we introduce HypoCompass, a novel system to facilitate deliberate practice on debugging, where human novices play the role of Teaching Assistants and help LLM-powered teachable agents debug code. We enable effective task delegation between students and LLMs in this learning-by-teaching environment: students focus on hypothesizing the cause of code errors, while adjacent skills like code completion are offloaded to LLM-agents. Our evaluations demonstrate that HypoCompass generates high-quality training materials (e.g., bugs and fixes), outperforming human counterparts fourfold in efficiency, and significantly improves student performance on debugging by 12% in the pre-to-post test.