Artificial intelligence continues to have a large impact on education. On the surface, it may seem like a lazy way for students to “cheat” on their assignments, but it actually has a lot of practical applications that can extend traditonal learning. It can automate simple tasks, anaalyze example code, identify bugs, or even explain complex concepts. In ICS 314, I mainly utilized ChatGPT and Github Copilot.
For most of the expirence WODS I relied on the embedded video tutorial / explantion. I think that they were easy to follwo along and explained the topics well. However, a couple of the tutorials seemed kind-of dated, for those I think I did ask ChatGPT for help.
For me, the point of these WODS was to test my current understanding of that week’s topics. I did not utilize Ai because I wanted to see what I needed to improve on for the real WODs.
I think I use ChatGPT once or twice just to figure out the correct syntax or solve an ESLint erorr, but all of the logic of the code was written by me.
I thought most of the essay topics were pretty simple, as a result, I found tha they were easy to write about. I don’t think I would have found ChatGPT useful in this context.
Yes, I did utilzie ChatGPT for the final project. An example would be the “student-home page” that I worked on. I used ChatGPT to help me create my inital mockup. I did not give it a prompt like “create this page for me”, instead, I input my react code and asked what css would be able to achieve the design elements I wanted. I thought this was a nice review from the html / css module earlier in the semester. Additonally, when it was time to implement functionality, I asked ChatGPT for help too. My goals was to pull data from the student + company schema and display it on the page, but this involved modifying the route.ts and authOptions.ts files. This was very complicated and took me over two hours to get working (with the help of ChatGPT). Overall, I would say my usage of it on this project was moderate, but I still gained a lot of experience and learned a lot.
I think so, but I can’t recall a specific example. I think this is one of the areas where ChatGPT can be very useful. It can explain it to you in multiple ways, something that a website tutorial or youtube video might not be able to do.
I don’t think I asked / answered a question in class or discord.
I don’t think I asked / answered a smart question.
Similar to 6, I think I did use it this way but I can’t remember an example. I also think this is an area where ChatGPT excells.
Yes, there were a lot of foreign or forgotten concpets of code I saw this semester, asking ChatGpt to explan specifc parts of code helped me tremendously. It made it easier to understand, which deepend my knowledge of the code itself.
Well sort of, sometimes I would ask ChatGPT to write code to do a certain tasks, but I would always add it to my code myself. I don’t really like the idea od just copy and pasting.
Unlike previous ICS classes I have been in, I did not write that much, if any, documentation code for my assignments. I think in-line comments were the only thing I did and I wrote them myself.
Yes, I think this is the thing I used ChatGPT the most for. Whenever I would get an error and not immediately be able to resolve it, I would copy and paste my entire cody into ChatGPT. It would be able to pinpoint the error in seconds, give an explanation as to why it was wrong, and provide a solution. This has likely saved me hours of debugging, and got rid of one of the most irritating elements of coding.
None.
I think the use of ChatGPT has improved my understanding, it is able to offer instant solutions that can explain the problem and solution in various ways. I think my comphrehension has increased as a reult. However, I think it has reduced my problem-solving skills. Whenever I run into a problem, my first instinct is to copy and paste it into ChatGPT to find the soltion. This is efficent, but it removes the process of debugging. Debugging is important because it allows you to go over your code multiple times, this deepens your understanding of it, and sometimes even allows you to find a more efficent way to write certain code. I have mixed feelings about the use of ChatGPT for instances like this, but in the future I think I will give myself a set amount of time to find a soltion before I consult ChatGPT. I think this will allow me to improve my skills, without having to spend hours debugging.
I think it definitely has practical uses outside the scope of coding classes. An example would be testing a project. Asking ChatGPT to explore or predict any problems and issues prior to releaase / deployment would be very helpful. It could catch missed errors, or offer improvements that would make the project more efficent for users and developers.
I think the main issue / challenge for me was the over-reliance on ChatGPT for answers. The convience of being able to recieve feedback almost instantly is hard to beat. As a result, I think my overall understanding of the code was hindered. I think a lot of other student suffered in similar ways. I don’t think there is a simple solution, Ai is only going to become more prevalent as time goes on, I think students have to decide for themsleves how much they are going to rely on it.
Compared to traditional methods like reading docuumnets or consulting stack overflow, Ai can provide faster, custom tailored repsonses. However, i do think this ultamitely reduced knowledge retainment and skill development. I think there needs to be a balance of the two in order for students to have the best expirence.
I think Ai such as ChatGPT will continue to have presence within software engineering education. In order to combat the negative effects of this (as mentioned above), I think educators will need to incorporate teaching styles that emphasize critical thinking and problem solving.
Overall, Ai has become, and will continue to be a part of software engineering education. I think it definetly has its benefits, it has helped me a lot thoughout the semester. However, it is hard to ignore some of the negative effects. I think that a balance of Ai and traditional learning will help students exceed.