High schools in nine countries have adopted the University of Florida’s three year curriculum that teaches basic skill sets of working with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), including using it to build skills such as coding and problem solving.
Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGPT) is a large language model-based chat bot that enables users to answer simple questions. Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in January that ChatGPT could make homework useless responding to the New York City School’s new policy to ban ChatGPT.
With the introduction of ChatGPT, A.I. has started to revolutionize the classroom. Many schools are currently debating whether or not to adopt A.I. in school teaching.
A.I. has many issues. For instance, A.I. allow students to cheat on tests. A.I. has also been reported to scrape content from a variety of sources but does not give credit to the creators of those sources. There are also cases in which A.I. uses inaccurate information, which leads to the spread of misinformation.
However, others believe that the educational system is outdated and with the ability of A.I, the regular homework and classroom curriculum is not applicable to the skills that will be needed in the future. In Los Angeles, English teacher Lindsay Humphrey uses A.I. to play a song and identify the visual waveform for the song to teach students the waveform of music. CRAFT (Classroom Ready Resource about A.I. for Teaching) is a project created by Stanford graduates, funded by theMcCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, to distribute A.I. resources that high school teachers can use in their teachings such as free 24 hours tutoring when the teacher is outside of the classroom. “An A.I. that I will use in my course is designed by Harvard CS 15 people, which is a Chatbot that helps students answer programming problems if they are not in the classroom,” Computer Science teacher Ms. Marisa Behar said.
Ms. Behar teaches students about machine learning and A.I. in her computer class. In her class, students explore the functions of A.I. and analyze the positive and negative of this new technology.
A.I. can help teachers personalize education curriculums, as the A.I. system can adapt to each student’s individual learning styles and create systems with targeted instructions based on their strengths and weaknesses. According to a study from the University of San Diego, “AI can zero in on the specific information or concepts that students are missing, so educators can deliver targeted improvements in materials and methods.”
The discussion of whether A.I. should be trusted in the classroom is still up for debate
