ChatGPT has received considerable attention in education, particularly in programming education because of its capabilities in automated code generation and program repairing and scoring. However, few empirical studies have investigated the use of ChatGPT to customize a learning system for scaffolding students’ computational thinking. Therefore, proposed here is an intelligent programming scaffolding system using ChatGPT following the theoretical framework of computational thinking and scaffolding. A mixed-method study was conducted to investigate the affordance of the scaffolding system using ChatGPT, and the findings show that most students had positive attitudes about the proposed system, and it was effective in improving their computational thinking generally but not their problem-solving skills. Therefore, more scaffolding strategies are discussed with the aim of improving student computational thinking, especially regarding problem-solving skills. The findings of this study are expected to guide future designs of generative artificial intelligence tools embedded in intelligent learning systems to foster students’ computational thinking and programming learning.

The particle degradation problem of particle filter (PF) algorithm caused by reduction of particle weights significantly influences the positioning accuracy of target nodes in wireless sensor networks. This study presents a predictor to obtain the particle swarm of high quality by calculating non‐linear variations of ranging between particles and flags and modifying the reference distribution function. To this end, probability variations of distances between particles and star flags are calculated and the maximum inclusive distance using the maximum probability of high‐quality particle swarm is obtained. The quality of particles is valued by the Euclidean distance between the predicted and real observations, and hereafter particles of high quality are contained in spherical coordinate system using the distance as diameter. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is robust and the computational complexity is low. The method can effectively improve the positioning accuracy and reduce the positioning error of target nodes.

The detection of students’ behaviors in classroom can provide a guideline for assessing the effectiveness of classroom teaching. This study proposes a classroom behavior detection algorithm using an improved object detection model (i.e., YOLOv5). First, the feature pyramid structure (FPN+PAN) in the neck network of the original YOLOv5 model is combined with a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN). They are subsequently processed with feature fusion of different scales of the object to mine the fine-grained features of different behaviors. Second, a spatial and channel convolutional attention mechanism (CBAM) is added between the neck network and the prediction network to make the model focus on the object information to improve the detection accuracy. Finally, the original non-maximum suppression is improved using the distance-based intersection ratio (DIoU) to improve the discrimination of occluded objects. A series of experiments were conducted on our new established dataset which includes four types of behaviors: listening, looking down, lying down, and standing. The results demonstrated that the algorithm proposed in this study can accurately detect various student behaviors, and the accuracy was higher than that of the YOLOv5 model. By comparing the effects of student behavior detection in different scenarios, the improved algorithm had an average accuracy of 89.8% and a recall of 90.4%, both of which were better than the compared detection algorithms.

The localization problem of target nodes remains unresolved, especially in large-scale and complex environments. In this paper, we propose a particle centroid drift (PCD) algorithm to reduce the distance errors between nodes and obtain the particle aggregation region by using the drift vector. First, we use the particle quality prediction function to obtain the particles in a high-likelihood region. The high-quality particles have high probability in the calculation, which can increase the number of effective particles and enable avoiding particle degradation. Then, the centroid drift vector is used to make the particle distribution similar to the actual reference distribution. Experiments are conducted on state-space models: the local movement where 55% nodes are moving and the globe movement where 100% nodes are moving. The results show that the proposed algorithm has low estimation errors, a good tracking effect and an acceptable time complexity.