An Experience Report on a Pedagogically Controlled, Curriculum-Constrained AI Tutor for SE Education

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education continues to evoke both promise and skepticism. While past waves of technological optimism often fell short, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revived the vision of scalable, individualized tutoring. This paper presents the design and pilot evaluation of RockStartIT Tutor, an AI-powered assistant developed for a digital programming and computational thinking course within the RockStartIT initiative. Powered by GPT-4 via OpenAI’s Assistant API, the tutor employs a novel prompting strategy and a modular, semantically tagged knowledge base to deliver context-aware, personalized, and curriculum-constrained support for secondary school students.