TABot: A Teaching Assistant Chatbot for Software Engineering Courses

The Software Engineering (SE) course primarily teaches students how to develop and maintain high-quality software using systematic processes, methods, and tools. Five teaching issues in the SE course, including course breadth, limited teaching assistant resources, limited teaching interaction, learning weaknesses, and poor team communication, hinder students from absorbing technical concepts, knowledge, and skills for necessary subjects in the SE field. In recent years, Digital Interactive Learning has received increasing attention. Among them, Chatbot was significantly under the spotlight. It can confirm the user's intention by analyzing the content of the dialogue and simulating a human conversation. To address the teaching issues for the SE course and leverage the benefits brought by Chatbots, in this study, we designed a Chatbot system, called TABot, to assist teaching and learning, especially for the SE course. This study designed multiple features that support students' learning, such as frequently asked questions, requests for course materials, and adaptive quiz practices. Furthermore, TABot also provides team supporting functions, such as reading the user requirements of their team project, group member contribution analysis, and GitHub commit retrieval. After being applied to an SE course, 80% of the students agreed that TABot could help them learn better for the SE course.