An Amazon Lex Based Interactive Virtual Assistant for C Programming

EasyChair Preprint no. 8333

Abstract

Amidst the global pandemic COVID-19, a nation-wide lockdown was imposed which changed the phase of the educational system. Classes and laboratories began to continue online. Although it seemed convenient listening to classes from home, students and teachers faced many challenges, especially dealing with online laboratories for undergraduate students. Due to the lack of virtual infrastructure to run laboratories online, teachers had to adjust teaching through platforms such as Microsoft teams and google meets. Considering the laboratory sessions for programming, students were asked to solve the given questions in their local IDEs and share their screens in case of any doubts and errors. As there was no possibility for the teacher to physically address their doubts and errors individually, it became a hectic task to clarify the doubts of all the students present in the class. It also decreased the student's efficiency in understanding the applications of the programming language. This is ineffective as it demands too much time for the students to share their screens to execute each problem, and the probability of students who lose interest in programming began to rise. To address this problem, we developed a user-friendly chat bot assistant, which clarifies doubts related to C programming language 24/7 named C-Genie. With the help of C-Genie, students can get the required assistance to solve problems, and get help in debugging their code. Using advanced Natural Language Processing techniques through AWS, this programming assistant increases the accessibility for students to get a better understanding of their errors even in the absence of teachers. This can increase the quality of learning and invokes the interest in students towards the concept of programming.

Keyphrases: Amazon Lex, Chatbot assistant, Online Laboratories, virtual infrastructure

@Booklet{EasyChair:8333,
  author = {V Baby and V Jhansi Lakshmi Bai and Sahithi Vesangi and Saketh Reddy Regatte},
  title = {An Amazon Lex Based Interactive Virtual Assistant for C Programming},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 8333},

  year = {EasyChair, 2022}}