Ask codey: AI tutor for programming education

Abstract

When practising competitive programming style questions online, students encounter significant challenges when seeking assistance. Human coaches provide high-quality, incremental, and personalized guidance, making them the most effective form of support. However, they are difficult to schedule, leading to slow feedback loops, and they come at a high cost, making them inaccessible to many. Online platforms and forums address these concerns but lack personalization. Since online resources do not always understand the specific problem a student is working on, the guidance provided is often generic. AI chatbots provide some personalization but are often cumbersome, requiring students to manually input code and explain their problem. Furthermore, most are not optimized for incremental guidance, frequently offering verbose responses or revealing full solutions which is not conducive for learning. To solve these challenges we introduce Ask Codey, a web based AI powered competitive programming learning platform designed to offer proactive, coach-like feedback. Ask Codey seamlessly blends traditional coding functionalities—such as accessing diverse coding challenges, compiling and running code against test cases, and debugging—with innovative AI-driven features. These include a dynamic hint generation module, proactive feedback, and an interactive LLM chat assistant. Together, these elements harness the creative potential of LLMs in a controlled manner, unlocking a more effective, engaging approach to learning. In this report, we detail the motivation, design, and evaluation of Ask Codey, highlighting the research and engineering insights that ensure our AI assistants are not only useful to end-users but also cost-effective and fast. Ask Codey currently focuses on K-through-12 competitive programming.