Mehmet Arif Demirtaş

Hi, I’m Arif!

I am a PhD candidate in the Computer Science department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a focus on computing education research and human computer interaction, advised by Dr. Katie Cunningham.

I explore two key questions in my research:

  • How can we support students who are non-CS majors as they learn programming? 💻
  • How do educators design instructional content, and how can we design creativity support tools informed by their design process? ✏️

Recent Updates

April 1, 2026
🎊 Our paper ''Leveraging Human-AI Collaboration for a Passage-Based Question Authoring Tool'' is accepted at AIED 2026!
This work investigates how human-AI collaboration can support passage-based question authoring for high-stakes educational testing with collaborators from ACT.
March 1, 2026
✍️ I attended SIGCSE 2026!
I attended SIGCSE 2026 in St Louis, MO, and had the chance to share our work on purpose-first tutorials for helping novices learn authentic programming applications in a general education computing course. Read the paper here.
February 1, 2026
🎓 I completed my MS in Computer Science at UIUC!
I obtained my master’s degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with my thesis on developing and evaluating domain models for programming skills using learning curve analysis.