Monitoring and Facilitating Students Programming Skill Development using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)–A Case Study

Abstract

Students are provided with an online training program Programming Skill Development. The Program conducts programming tests every day by which the students have to solve programming problems within the given time duration. Based on the solutions given by students, a daily report is generated by the online training program. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be effectively used to generate more reports (based on the above data) daily focused on students' attendance, problems solved and other details categorized as the students' mentors. As each mentor has about 20 to 25 students, the mentor can use the reports further to analyze the performance and individually mentor and guide the students. The paper describes an RPA- based reporting tool developed using UiPath and implemented successfully in the Department of Electronics and Communication (ECE) of R.M.K. Engineering College for about 540 students and 35 faculty members as mentors. Currently, further enhancements are planned in the tool to provide more useful reports based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) principles. Reports will include the students' cumulative past performance in the programming, areas of his/her strengths and weaknesses in the programming skills (like the type of problems solved: arithmetic, logical, etc., type of errors: logic or programming language-related, etc.). The RPA- based tool will also enable such analysis to be sent to each student's email automatically using a software bot so that he/she can plan for improvement.