DynamiQue – A Technical Intervention To Augment Static Textbook with Dynamic Q&A

ABSTRACT

E-books have become more prevalent in the present day, due to their availability and numerous advantages over textbooks, and more so in the domain of computer science and programming. On the other hand, learners also use Q&A websites such as Stack Overflow as these websites provides a platform for asking and answering questions in communication with the developer community. Even though learning programming requires dynamic content, the current e-books are observed to be static in nature. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to overlay related Q&As throughout the e-book, bringing dynamic content into a static textbook. The approach consists in summarizing different parts of the text, identifying core keywords from the text, finding related core Q&As from Stack Overflow and finally integrating Q&As into the e-book. To achieve this, we take an e-book as input, apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation and generate augmented e-book with relevant Q&As. We have evaluated DynamiQue prototype with 30 volunteers in the age group of 18–25 years using a likert scale-based questionnaire. The initial results are promising with all the questions having a mean score greater than 3.4. Volunteers also suggested the scope to improve user interface as well as the relevance of Q&As.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic Textbook
• Novice Programmers‌
• Stack Overflow
• Q&A
• LDA

Acknowledgements

We thank all the participants for their valuable time and honest feedback that helped us in evaluating DynamiQue. We also thank our undergraduate student, Vagavolu Dheeraj for his support in developing the DynamiQue web portal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla

Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla is a PhD scholar in the Department of Computer Science Engineering, pursuing her thesis in the areas of Software Engineering, specifically in Software Documentation, at Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Tirupati, India. She is interested in the areas of End User Software Engineering. More specifically, she examines more research aspects in finding ways to support novice programmers and end user software engineers.

Sridhar Chimalakonda

Sridhar Chimalakonda is an Assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Tirupati, India. He received his PhD and MS by Research in Computer Science & Engineering from International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad, India. He Served as a Co-Editor for several international standards [ISO/IEC 26551, 26552, 26553, 26554, 26555] in the area of software product lines. His primary research includes Software Engineering and Educational Technologies, specifically Software Quality and Reuse. He is passionate about the massive potential of technology for improving the quality of education and automation in educational technologies.