Adaptive coding practice

Adaptive coding.
Guided practice for every student.

Your students write their own code. A built-in guide breaks hard problems into smaller steps and offers help only when they’re stuck.

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Hard problems broken into smaller steps
Students choose the help they need
Help that steps up from hints to puzzles
Teachers see every hint students use

Watch a student get unstuck

A student gets stuck and picks the help they need, from a hint to a Parsons puzzle. You see every step.

Students choose the help they need

Pathfinder has no chat box: a student never types a question to a language model. Alps breaks each hard problem into subproblems, and the student picks which kind of help they want, building independence as they go. You see which help each one used.

Overview

Shows the subproblems and how far the student has gotten, without giving away the answer.

Hints

Hints start as a nudge and get more specific. Alps skips hints for steps already done.

Scaffolds

A starting outline — pseudocode, comments, or a method stub — shown beside the editor. Students still write all the code themselves.

Parsons detour

Still stuck? Solve the subproblem as a drag-and-drop puzzle, then type the solution.

Progress tracking

Alps knows where each student is

Alps checks every run of a student’s code, so help goes to the step where they’re stuck.

  • ✓ Errors point students to the right subproblem
  • ✓ Hints skip ahead when the code shows a step is done
  • ✓ A subproblem is marked complete only when the code shows it
Progress example
find_min()
Completed: all tests pass
selection_sort()
In progress: outer loop written, inner loop missing
Hint 3 of 5: "The inner loop should look for the smallest element, starting from index i+1..."
Teacher view

See the help each student used

A timeline shows every hint, scaffold, and Parsons detour, in the order the student used them.

  • ✓ See which hints were shown and which were skipped
  • ✓ Review each Parsons solution and the help offered on it
Teacher review: student timeline
Overview shown: student saw the subproblem breakdown
Hint 1 for find_min(): "Compare each element to track the minimum"
Hint 2 for find_min(): "Track the minimum value AND its index"
Focus switched to selection_sort() after finishing find_min()
Parsons completed for selection_sort(): student solved the puzzle

Grounded in learning science

Subgoal learning

Labeled subgoals help students see a problem’s structure and apply it to new problems.

Zone of proximal development

Hints step up until the task fits what the student can do right now.

Student agency

Students who choose their own help build stronger metacognitive skills.

Tutor-style hints

Like a good tutor, hints get more specific and skip what the student already knows.

How it works in your course

Adaptive coding is on by default. There’s nothing to write or set up.

On by default

Most coding problems in every curriculum offer adaptive help. Assign a chapter and your students get it.

You stay in control

Turn adaptive help on or off for each assignment. Use it for practice and switch it off for tests.

See what Pathfinder did

See the help Pathfinder offered each student, what they used, and where they still struggled.

Feature comparison

How Alps compares

Feature Alps Other platforms
Breaks problems into subproblems automatically
Hints that get more specific as students need them
Students choose the kind of help
A Parsons puzzle for each subproblem
Teachers see a timeline of every hint and scaffold used ~
Tracks progress on each subproblem ~
Subgoal labels students can reveal as a hint

Add adaptive coding to your course

Start with a free account. Every student gets help at the moment they need it, and you can group your class by mastery for practice at each level.

Try adaptive coding free