Secondary school students enrolled in the AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course commonly utilize web resources (e.g., tutorials, Q\&A sites) to better understand key concepts in the curriculum. The primary obstacle to using these resources is finding information appropriate for the learning task and student's background. In addition to web search, conversational agents are increasingly a viable alternative for CSP students. In this paper, we study the potential of conversational agents to aid secondary school students as they acquire knowledge on CSP concepts. We explore general purpose, generative conversational agents (e.g., ChatGPT) and custom, fixed-response conversational agents built specifically to aid CSP students. We present results from classroom use by 45 high school students in grades 9-11 (ages 14-17) across six CSP sections. Our main contributions are in better understanding how conversational agents can help CSP students and an evaluation of the effectiveness and engagement of different approaches for CSP exploratory search.

翻译：参加AP计算机科学原理（CSP）课程的中学生通常利用网络资源（如教程、问答网站）来更好地理解课程中的关键概念。使用这些资源的主要障碍在于找到适合学习任务和学生背景的信息。除了网络搜索外，对话式代理正逐渐成为CSP学生的可行替代方案。本文研究了对话式代理在帮助中学生获取CSP概念知识方面的潜力。我们探讨了通用型生成式对话代理（如ChatGPT）以及专门为帮助CSP学生构建的定制固定应答对话代理。我们展示了来自45名9至11年级（14-17岁）高中生跨6个CSP课堂的使用结果。我们的主要贡献在于更深入地理解对话式代理如何帮助CSP学生，并对不同方法在CSP探索性搜索中的有效性和参与度进行了评估。