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Generative AI (GenAI) is Here. What Does Learning to Program Look Like Now?
Friday June 6, 2025 9:15am - 11:45am CDT
Everyone knows that programming skills can help people be more effective across many different types of jobs. It can also be a source of intense creativity for hobbyists who wish to create digital artifacts in the 21st century. Learning to program, however, has historically been a daunting task. Programming languages are hard to learn and unforgiving when people make mistakes.
Generative AI (GenAI) tools have the potential to turn all of this on its head. Rather than speaking to a computer in a syntactically rigid programming language, programmers can now interact with a GenAI in a natural language, like English.
Specifically GenAI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, can solve introductory programming assignments. They can solve introductory programming exam questions. They can trace code step by step, explain what code does, help debug (fix) code, convert code from one programming language to another, and generate test cases for code.
So then: that’s it? We’re done? We don’t need to learn programming anymore?
Not so fast :D
While it’s true that GenAI can contribute to carrying out many programming tasks, in this talk we will demonstrate that rather than causing programming to go away, GenAI has the potential to lead us to ever-higher levels of problem solving, needed if we are to keep pace with the world’s demand for software.
We’ll begin with a brief summary of what the research says about GenAI and learning to program. Do students learn when using GenAI, and how can learning be enhanced? What are the effects of GenAI on learner creativity? Can GenAI serve as an effective tutor?
Next, we’ll describe the design goals and findings emerging from the Computing Education Research Laboratory at UC San Diego as we create and study an introductory programming course for majors and non-majors that fully incorporates GenAI and can provide materials for anyone interested in our approach.
Featured Speakers
avatar for Dr. Daniel Zingaro

Dr. Daniel Zingaro

Associate Professor, University of Toronto Mississauga
Dr. Daniel Zingaro is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Toronto. His passion is taking everything he knows about teaching and learning to create books that put the learner first. Most recently, Dr. Zingaro and Leo Porter wrote Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming... Read More →
avatar for Leo Porter

Leo Porter

Professor, Author, University of California San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department
Leo Porter is a Teaching Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego. He is best known for his research on the impact of Peer Instruction in computing courses, the use of clicker data to predict student outcomes, and the development of the Basic Data... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 9:15am - 11:45am CDT
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