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How to light the fire?

Can You Teach AI to Teach You?

“Education Is Not the Filling of a Pail, But the Lighting of a Fire”

Often attributed to W.B. Yeats

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”

Often attributed to Socrates

Link to JupyterBook

Background

This is a jupyter book for the course Introduction to Computer Programming at City University of Hong Kong. The course aims to introduce key concepts, techniques, and good practices of programming using a high-level programming language Python.

Course Intended Learning Outcomes (CILOs):

  1. Explain the structure of a computer program.

  2. Analyze, test and debug computer programs.

  3. Apply proper programming techniques to solve a task.

  4. Construct well-structured programs.

  • Designed in 2019 (during COVID-19) and implemented since 2020/21 Semester A.

  • Grown to >600 students in 2025/26:

    • ~240 CS, ~370 non-CS students

    • ~440 non-CS studnets in semester B

Courseware

DIVE (TALE 2022/2025)

An in-house kubernetes cluster to run interative teaching materials.

Interactive Python/C++

import ROOT
print("Hello, World!")
Hello, World!

%%cpp
cout << "Hello, World!\n"; 
Hello, World!

!nvidia-smi  # Access to GPU if available
Fri Feb 27 09:19:23 2026       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.169                Driver Version: 570.169        CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA RTX 5880 Ada Gene...    Off |   00000000:1E:00.0 Off |                  Off |
| 30%   29C    P8             32W /  285W |       2MiB /  49140MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI              PID   Type   Process name                        GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Integrated with GenAI:

%%hermes
Explain briefly the ingredients involved in writing the following program:
--
def gcd(a, b): return gcd(b%a, a) if a else abs(b)  # one-liner for GCD
Loading...
🌿 Fork/new: main (will create on click)
See Also

To write the program def gcd(a, b): return gcd(b%a, a) if a else abs(b), the following ingredients are involved:

  1. Recursion: The function calls itself (gcd(...)) to break down the problem into smaller sub-problems until it reaches a base case.

  2. The Euclidean Algorithm: The logic relies on the mathematical principle that the greatest common divisor of two numbers doesn’t change if the larger number is replaced by its remainder when divided by the smaller number (e.g., b % a).

  3. Ternary Operator (Conditional Expression): The X if Condition else Y syntax is used to provide a concise way to handle both the recursive step and the base case in a single line.

  4. Base Case Logic:

    • if a: If aa is non-zero, it continues the recursion by swapping terms and taking the modulo.

    • else abs(b): If aa is zero, the GCD is simply the absolute value of bb.

  5. Modulo Operator (%): Used to find the remainder of bb divided by aa.

  6. Absolute Value (abs()): Ensures that if bb is negative at the base case, the result remains positive, as GCD is conventionally non-negative.

Interative Materials instead of PPTs

E-Quiz (TALE 2023)

  • Over 200 questions for students to instantly check and debug their solution with AI.

  • Conduct computer-based exams in Safe-Exam Browser with restricted access to AI.

Misuse of AI

An Example

  • Student: John Smith (fake name)

  • Assignments: 99.55%

  • Midterm: 30%

The Bug

Misuse of GenAI to generate bug-free solution in assignments:

  • bypasses computational thinking in constructing good programs

  • bypasses opportunities to debug

  • creates an illusion of competence

CE-Quiz (INTED 2026)

In-class collaborative E-Quiz assignments with help from

  • classmates (TBL),

  • student helpers (PALSI), and

  • a visual debugger (OPTMentor) with Socratic AI.

Socratic AI (TALE 2025)

A tailor-made AI model for

  • students to have AI-assisted visual debugger, and

  • instructors to provide quality feedback to lab assignments.

OPTMentor running in-browser without a server

  • Turns error into thought-provoking questions that help debugging.

  • Uses a highly portable small language models (SLM) trained on DIVE by a CS1302 student.

Agentic Coding

Student-Developed Packages in a Summer (Submitted to TALE 2026)

  • hermes-acp-sdk - Python package for integrating the Hermes AI agent into existing applications with minimal code.

  • traceback-coach - Explains Python notebook tracebacks in a structured, human-readable way with guided debugging questions.

  • hermes-textstats - Lightweight text analysis tool for word counts, sentence counts, lexical diversity, and reading-time estimates.

  • obj-tag-group - Utility for attaching tags to Python objects and retrieving them through tag or regex searches.

  • sliveshow - JupyterLab extension for turning notebooks into animated slide presentations with live code execution.

  • socratic-watchdog - Socratic TTS assistant that monitors notebook execution and provides spoken guidance when students need help.

  • ultrasonic-img-steg - Package for embedding and recovering image data within inaudible frequencies of lossless audio files.

Core Concepts

Student-Developed Notebooks

Plumbing

Boldfaced co-authors were undergraduate students at CityUHK.

  1. Chan, Chung, Suvernev, Bogdan, Zhao, Chao, & Wang, Zimeng. (2026). CE-QUIZ: AI-Assisted Debugging in Exams, INTED2026 Proceedings, Article 1724. doi:10.21125/inted.2026.1724

  1. Chan, Chung, Suvernev, Bogdan, Wang, Zimeng, Liang, Qihang, & Zhao, Chao. (2025). Making GenAI Socratic for Computational Thinking. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE), 1–8. doi:10.1109/tale66047.2025.11346691

  1. Chan, Chung, Zhao, Chao, Chau, Wai Tong, Zhou, Yu, Liang, Qihang, & Lim, Michael. (2023). E-Quiz: Empowering Educators with a Self-Contained and Programmable Online Exam System. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE), 21, 1–8. doi:10.1109/tale56641.2023.10398402

  1. Chan, Chung, Kozhin, Assan, Liang, Qihang, Salter, Glenn, Tang, Ruoqin, Ye, Chunxiao, & Zhao, Chao. (2022). DIVE: Make Online Learning Diversified, Interactive, Versatile, and Engaging. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE), 482–489. doi:10.1109/tale54877.2022.00085

Footnotes

  1. Radul, A., & Sussman, G. J. (2009). The art of the propagator. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report, MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-002.

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Lecture 1
Introduction to Computer Programming