Mehmet Arif Demirtaş

Hi, I’m Arif!

I am a PhD student 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’m interested in having a better understanding of

  • how students learn programming 💻
  • what obstacles they face and how we can address these to broaden participation in CS 🌍
  • how we can design technologies to aid their learning process 📚

Recent Updates

April 15, 2025
🎊 Our paper ''Generating Planning Feedback for Open-Ended Programming Exercises with LLMs'' is accepted at AIED 2025!
This work is about an exploratory pipeline to generate high-level planning feedback for open-ended programming exercises that are traditionally evaluated with test cases. Our work provides a new dimension of feedback in addition to correctness by detecting if the students are trying to implement the right approach, even in syntactically or semantically incorrect submissions. Preprint here.
Feb 1, 2025
🎊 Our paper ''PLAID: Supporting Computing Instructors to Identify Domain-Specific Programming Plans at Scale'' is accepted at CHI 2025!
In this work, we identified instructor needs for developing instruction for application-focused computing domains through interviews and design workshops, designed PLAID as an interface for navigating and refining LLM-generated content to address these needs, and evaluated it through an user study. Preprint here.
Dec 8, 2024
✍️ I attended SIGCSE Virtual 2024!
I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on teaching planning and decomposition skills with valuable panelists Dr Eliane S. Wiese, James Finnie-Ansley, Dr Rodrigo Silva Duran, and Dr Kathryn Cunningham. I also presented at the doctoral consortium organized by Dr Lauri Malmi and Dr Colleen Lewis.
Aug 8, 2024
✈️🇦🇺 I'm in Melbourne for ICER 2024!
I will present our work on programming plans on Wednesday.
July 29, 2024
✈️🌉 I'm in Pittsburgh for LearnLab Summer School!
I will be participating in the Computing Education Research track of the LearnLab Summer School.
July 15, 2024
✈️🍑 I'm in Atlanta for EDM 2024 and L@S 2024!
I’m presenting our replication study on Wednesday, and participating in the Doctoral Consortium on Monday and Tuesday.
June 1, 2024
🎊 Our paper ''Validating, Refining, and Identifying Programming Plans Using Learning Curve Analysis on Code Writing Data'' is accepted at ICER 2024!
In this paper, we focused on programming plans as a potential knowledge component model with my co-authors Max Fowler, Nicole Hu, and Katie Cunningham. Our analysis provides a tool to visualize students’ plan acquisition process and evaluate plans on how well students can apply them to solve new problems. Preprint here.
May 15, 2024
🎊 Our paper ''Reexamining Learning Curve Analysis in Programming Education: The Value of Many Small Problems'' is accepted at EDM 2024!
In this work, we replicated Kelly Rivers et al.’s 2016 paper with my co-authors Max Fowler and Katie Cunningham. Surprisingly, we found that AST nodes can model skill acquisition to a promising extent, contrary to prior findings, especially in courses with many short programming exercises. Our preprint is available here.