Enhancing Learning with AI in ICS 314
17 Dec 2024
AI has the potential to be a very beneficial tool in education, it can provide new ways to present concepts and allow students to interact with the material in a variety of interactive ways. In ICS 314, I utilized ChatGPT in a variety of situations to support my learning and problem-solving efforts.
For instance, I would often use ChatGPT to clarify what the purpose or output of certain lines of code was. When faced with any unfamiliar code, for example, in-class WODs, I asked, ‘What does this code do /code here/?’. One time, the WOD instructions suggested using a piece of code that I was unfamiliar with. ChatGPT helped me immediately understand its function, enabling me to confidently proceed with the exercise. In another in-class practice WOD on HTML, I had some problems with the alignment of text. As I did not know how to use spacing yet, I asked ChatGPT, ‘How can I make sure this text is aligned to the middle of the page?’ and included the relevant code. The AI gave clear instructions that allowed me to solve the problem effectively. Similarly I found AI useful to ask ChatGPT some of the smart-questions that people had posted in the discord, so I could try and learn from it. I also have used ChatGPT to help answer questions that I’d think of after class, such as “What are the runtimes for the different array instance methods in JavaScript?”.
Though I didn’t use ChatGPT during the Experience WODs nor to help write essays because I had the time to experiment and try different things with the Experience WODs and using AI to help write essays doesn’t feel right. AI was however, an essential assistant in my final project. I used it in my final project to help with debugging. ChatGPT was really helpful tool to tell me why I was receiving an error message. I would ask ‘/error here//code here/ Why am I seeing this error?’ The AI helped me trace the cause of these issues without wasting much time and helped quicken the debugging process. I also used ChatGPT to go deeper into the JavaScript array instance methods. I asked ChatGPT to “teach me about JavaSCript array instance methods” and it organized 15 array methods, gave code examples for each, and explained what they were used for. This explanation helped me learn and gave me practical examples to refer to. I did not use AI for code documentation, as I wanted to do the documentation myself. In any case, ChatGPT was very instrumental in my learning process and helped me learn faster and more effectively in general.