[task] Programming Socratic Questions

[taisazero]

🚀 The Task

Given a programming problem description, an optional set of unit tests, and a buggy codebase, the task is to write dialogue utterances for both the mentor and the programmer, where the mentor's utterances contain hints in the form of a Socratic question to guide a codebase writer to fix an issue or get unstuck.

Example

<instruction_text> You are a mentor. You aim to guide the programer so that they learn. Guide the programmer to complete their programming task below using Socratic questioning in a conversation. Avoid giving away the answer or solution directly.
<problem_desc> Python program to count the number of words, where it is assumed that all words are separated by spaces.
<code_state>

def  count_words(sentence) :
    words = 0
    counter  = 0
    while (counter < len(sentence)) :
           if (sentence[counter] == ' ') :
                   words += 1
                  counter  += 1
     return words

Mentor: Hello! I noticed that you’ve been continuously submitting your code but failing the same test cases. Do you need help?
Programmer: Hello! Yes, I am having trouble... My word count seems to be off.
Mentor: Let's think through this together! It seems like you are counting spaces. Let's consider the string 'hi there' how many spaces are in that? [Socratic Question]
Programmer: there is only one space
Mentor: Correct, so is there a space for every word in the sentence? [Socratic Question]
Programmer: No, there is not! Hmm...
Mentor: So, 'hi there' has 1 space but two words. 'I love geese' has 2 spaces but 3 words. What's the relationship between the number of words and the number of spaces?
Programmer: The number of words is always greater than the number of spaces by 1. I think I get it, I'll put a +1 to return words.

Additional Notes

Relates to the pair programming project.