Artificial Intelligence is really transforming education by providing innovative tools that enhance learning experience and really tailor educational content to fit a person’s needs. AI’s role is to optimize development processes, and provide a quick learning resource for students and professionals. AI is especially impactful in software engineering because it has the ability to generate code based on prompts. Throughout my ICS 314 class, the two AI that I have used the most are ChatGPT and Claude AI. ChatGPT is really good because it’s free so I can ask unlimited questions without worrying about cool downs. On the other hand, Claude AI is also free with the free plan but there is a limited amount of prompts until there is a cooldown which I have to wait for a while before I can ask questions again. Towards the end of the class, we are tasked with building a website. Claude AI is really good here because it’s tailor towards web development.
Experience WODs
In-class Practice WODs
In-class WODs
Essays
Final project
Learning a concept / tutorial
Answering a question in class or in Discord
Asking or answering a smart-question
Coding example
Explaining code
Writing code
Documenting code
Quality assurance
Other uses in ICS 314 not listed I also used ChatGPT to help me understand concepts in Javascript that I had a really hard time understanding like callback functions.
AI has definitely been an outstanding learning tool that enhanced my learning experience. It’s both good and bad. It’s really good for the theory part of the class because it is really good at explaining concepts in a way that is easy to understand. But on the other hand I think my over reliance on AI has definitely hurt me more than it helped. AI is really good at doing tedious/repetitive tasks. But it’s so good at problem solving that if I pasted in a prompt it answers it for me instantly. This really hurts my problem solving skills because I’m not struggling to understand or fix the issue anymore since ChatGPT does it for me so I did not learn the concepts in this class as deeply as I would like to. In my opinion ChatGPT is not good for practical learning, because we need to struggle to find the answer to actually understand why things work the way they work.
I think AI is really for practical applications like when working on a project to build a web app or a mobile application, I think AI is really good at getting tedious tasks done so this means that AI can help get projects done faster. But the code is not perfect and there will always be bugs so ultimately the person coding has to really understand how the code work to fix the bugs, this is really important because this is the limitation of someone who does not know how to code use AI to build apps is that they can be only as good as the AI, but won’t know how to fix problems when there is bugs.
Similarly to what I already said earlier, I really struggled to understand the software engineering concepts later in the class when we had to build a website because I was over reliant on AI during the WODs. I did not try to fix the problem when there were bugs but instead I just plugged it into ChatGPT, I now understand that I can’t do this forever because I won’t know how to fix the bugs that AI creates.
I would say AI is really good at helping students start on their homework because it give confidence that something is working. So in my opinion, I think AI is a super good learning tool. But the drawback is that students get over reliant on AI and struggle to understand concepts later down the line and it’s really hard to catch up. I’m experiencing this first hand and it’s really dangerous.
My recommendation for this class moving on is that the practice wods be able to use AI and the real in-class WODs not being able to use AI. This is really important because it will force students to understand the concepts which will prepare them for the final project.
Overall AI is really powerful and knowing it’s strength and limitations is crucial towards leveraging it to help you grow and become smarter and more efficient.