S. Moonwara A. Monisha

arXiv2026

Exploring the Design Space of LLM-Based Programming Support in CS Education: A Scoping Review through the Lens of Assistance Governance

As large language models (LLMs) become integrated into programming education, learner-facing systems increasingly differ in how that assistance is bounded, enacted, and controlled. These governance decisions are often described implicitly, making it difficult to compare systems in educationally meaningful ways. To address this gap, we conduct a scoping review and qualitative synthesis of 90 peer-reviewed LLM-based programming support systems in CS education. We analyze assistance governance through three dimensions, which we refer to collectively as PEA: Policy, capturing what forms of help are allowed or restricted; Enforcement, capturing how those boundaries are operationalized through interaction and system behavior; and Authority, capturing who can configure, adapt, or override them during use. Our findings show that systems often share similar pedagogical goals, but implement those goals through varied enforcement mechanisms. At the same time, authority remains highly centralized in system logic, with fewer systems giving learners or instructors runtime control. This work contributes PEA as a three-dimensional analytic lens, a governance codebook empirically refined within these dimensions, and a map of underexplored configurations in the current design space of LLM-based programming support. By making these explicit and comparable, PEA offers a vocabulary for analyzing existing systems and designing future tools that are pedagogically bounded, configurable, and accountable.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Drawing Your Programs: Exploring the Applications of Visual-Prompting with GenAI for Teaching and Assessment

When designing a program, both novice programmers and seasoned developers alike often sketch out -- or, perhaps more famously, whiteboard -- their ideas. Yet despite the introduction of natively multimodal Generative AI models, work on Human-GenAI collaborative coding has remained overwhelmingly focused on textual prompts -- largely ignoring the visual and spatial representations that programmers naturally use to reason about and communicate their designs. In this proposal and position paper, we argue and provide tentative evidence that this text-centric focus overlooks other forms of prompting GenAI models, such as problem decomposition diagrams functioning as prompts for code generation in their own right enabling new types of programming activities and assessments. To support this position, we present findings from a large introductory Python programming course, where students constructed decomposition diagrams that were used to prompt GPT-4.1 for code generation. We demonstrate that current models are very successful in their ability to generate code from student-constructed diagrams. We conclude by exploring the implications of embracing multimodal prompting for computing education, particularly in the context of assessment.

cs.CY↗