Challenges and Opportunities in Integrating Interactive Chatbots into Code Review Exercises: A Pilot Case Study

While chatbots are commonly used to support software developers with repetitive tasks, their use in programming education is still limited, particularly for students in non-technical domains. To better understand the potential for chatbots to support programming education, we conducted a pilot case study aimed at integrating interactive chatbots into an online lesson on programming best practices. Using an educational application simulating the code review process, students were introduced to Python code style guidelines as a part of their practical work for a course on computational thinking aimed at non-technical graduate students. Our mixed-method analysis sheds light on the opportunities and challenges affecting the implementation of our chatbot integration and its potential for adoption in programming education. While we identified opportunities to guide students through predefined conversational pathways, provide students with personalized content, allow students to request support from the instructor, and incorporate humor into the learning process, we also encountered challenges involving configuration, repeated exposures, and limited scripts. These findings have implications that affect the design considerations of the technological and pedagogical aspects of our chatbot integration, which are relevant to educators and researchers in digital education looking to incorporate similar chatbot technologies into their practice. Strategies for harnessing these opportunities and addressing these challenges in future work are discussed.