Our Education Research team built an AI-powered hints that helps students understand errors and investigated how students actually use the tool.

JetBrains is a software development company known for its suite of developer tools, including integrated development environments (IDEs) such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and WebStorm. Through its platform, JetBrains provides developers with powerful tools for coding, debugging, and collaboration, across a wide range of programming languages and frameworks. From their blog developers can learn about JetBrains' IDE features, productivity tips, and best practices for using its tools effectively to streamline their development workflows and boost productivity.

JetBrains

JetBrains Education Research team studied how students interact with an AI-powered hints tool integrated into JetBrains Academy courses via the IDE plugin. Using process mining on a dataset of over 1 million IDE events and 1,400+ hint requests from 34 students learning Kotlin, they identified three session types: positive (28%, hint accepted), neutral (40%, hint seen but not directly applied), and negative (27%, error or cancellation). Qualitative interviews with six students revealed two key behavioral patterns in neutral sessions: 'selective use of hints' (manually adapting hints for better learning) and 'combining partial solutions' (merging information from multiple hint attempts). Key findings show students are active problem solvers who critically analyze hints rather than blindly accepting them, and that the tool should better support partial hint adoption and simultaneous multi-hint display.

How Students Are Using AI-Powered Hints in Programming Courses

Learning to code with the help of smart feedback