Using AI As A Study Buddy
03 May 2024
I. Introduction
AI has definitely changed the way students learn and understand information in the course of ICS 314. Speaking from experience, I have used AI several times to check my work and ask questions about why the solutions it gave me were correct. To my surprise, I found myself learning a lot from utilizing this amazing tool that is AI. I have experimented with various AI applications such as Blackbox, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bard, but ChatGPT has been the most consistent among these. ChatGPT was able to produce solutions and give a detailed explanation on why its given solution is correct, which in my experience is almost always right. However, it does occasionally make errors. This is why you can’t always expect to get the right response; it is essential to cross-verify solutions with other sources or use one’s own knowledge to confirm the correctness of the responses.
II. Personal Experience with AI:
1 Experience WODs e.g., E18
For the “Experience WODs,” I never used AI for these exercises because they were supposed to prepare you for the upcoming WOD every Thursday, so I avoided the use of AI since I wanted to learn it on my own.
2 In-class Practice WODs
Similarly, for the In-class practice WODs, I found these to be a way for me to practice for the upcoming In-class WODs. We also worked in a group, so there was no point for me to use AI since my group usually collaborated with each other to find the solutions together.
3 In-class WODs
For the in-class WODs, at first I avoided using AI for half of the WODs since I thought that I wouldn’t learn anything if I asked AI for help. But then I realized that I couldn’t work well under pressure with the timer, so I decided halfway through the semester that I was going to try the WOD on my own first and, if I wasn’t able to complete the WOD on my own, rather than sitting there looking for my mistakes, I would then ask AI to help me and direct me to the right solution.
4 Essays
I’ve used AI for a couple of my essays, but it was just to check for my grammar and spelling. I also asked it for title suggestions, but I never really took any suggestions from it; it just helped me create my own title.
5 Final project
For the final project, I used AI several times to check why my code wasn’t working. I had many issues I couldn’t understand, so I went to AI to help me understand what was going on with my code.
6 Learning a concept / tutorial
I used AI many times if I was stuck with a concept I couldn’t understand, but it’s always good to try to learn the concept on your own before asking AI for help.
7 Answering a question in class or in Discord
I never really participated much in answering questions on Discord, therefore I didn’t use AI for this specific task.
8 Asking or answering a smart-question
Similarly, I never really asked for help on Discord, so I never used AI for this topic.
9 Coding example e.g., “give an example of using Underscore .pluck”
This is usually my approach to learning a concept in coding where I would ask the AI to give me an example of using a certain method or function in a code to better understand that concept.
10 Explaining code
I’ve used AI a couple of times to explain code to someone since I’m not really good at explaining things to people, and when I do, it just gets more confusing, so I use AI to guide me through this process.
11 Writing code
When I write code, I try to do it myself before asking AI to help me write code, but I do take code from examples that the AI gives me.
12 Documenting code
The way I document my code is very simple, so I never really needed AI’s help to write documentation for my code.
13 Quality assurance
I certainly used AI to ask questions like “What’s wrong with this code here”, but for ESLint errors, they are pretty easy to understand, and IntelliJ has a built-in function where it can do the fix for you automatically.
III. Impact on Learning and Understanding:
In my personal experience, I have learned a great deal from using AI to understand many concepts thrown at me in ICS 314 and other classes. The only reason why AI could be very harmful is when somebody abuses it just for the answers, rather than using it as a tool to learn and improve themselves.
IV. Practical Applications:
There are many practical applications that AI is used for outside of ICS 314. Recently, there was AI released where the user is asked for a prompt and the style of music, and it will create music with the topic given and the genre selected. There are also many different AI applications that create art with a given prompt.
V. Challenges and Opportunities:
I encountered many challenges while using AI; there were countless times AI has given me answers that, at a glance, you know are very wrong, but the worst part is when it explains why the answer it has given you is correct, which makes it believable that it has given you the right answer. Since AI is approaching a level where it is used mostly every day, one opportunity we can integrate into software engineering is to spend time learning how to create a “smart prompt,” where rather than giving the AI a very simple prompt to give an answer to, we would have smart prompts just like smart questions that are asked on Discord.
VI. Comparative Analysis:
The biggest difference between learning from AI and a teacher is that AI can go at your own pace, while a teacher is teaching an entire class; the teacher doesn’t have the time to stop the entire class if you do not understand the material. Professors also tend to give general information on the topic that they are teaching, while AI can go in depth on the topic or concept you are trying to learn.
VII. Future Considerations:
The roles of AI in software engineering education are limitless, but as mentioned above, an improvement would be to teach students how to properly use AI and how to effectively use it.
VIII. Conclusion:
AI has been a great tool in assisting me with solving many of my problems through ICS 314. It helped me understand a lot of software engineering topics by giving me detailed explanations on the concepts that I wanted to learn. As mentioned, AI can be a great tool in helping people, but it has to be used in the right way and not abused just to make ends meet.