Intentional Teaching Generative AI in Computer Science with Brett Becker
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Since November 2022, higher education has been trying to wrap its collective mind around the advent of AI text generators like ChatGPT. For those of us who teach courses where we might ask students to respond to a prompt by writing a short essay, ChatGPT and similar tools certainly seem to provide students a way out of doing that writing themselves.
However, our colleagues who teach computer science and computer programming often ask their students to write computer code in respond to a prompt. As it turns out, there are a number of generative AI tools that pre-date ChatGPT that can pretty much answer any coding question you might ask a student in a first- or second-semester programming class.
This means that computer science education has had a bit more time to figure out how to respond to new AI tools that can short circuit the learning process for their students. In this episode, I talk with Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in the School of Computer Science. He has co-authored at least two papers on the use of AI code generation tools in computer science education, and he is deep in these discussions in his field.
In our conversation, Brett explores how new AI tools are leading computer science educators to rethink their learning goals, their assessments, and how they teach their students the ethics of computer programming. There are a lot of lessons here for educators in other fields figuring out what to do with AI tools!
Episode Resources:
Brett Becker's website, https://www.brettbecker.com/
"Programming Is Hard--Or At Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities and Challenges of AI Code Generation," co-authored by Brett Becker, https://www.brettbecker.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/becker2023programming.pdf
"'It's Weird That It Knows What I Want': Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice Programmers," co-authored by Brett Becker, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02491
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