I used AI a lot during my practicum and I have used it a lot while working with kids. I’ve mostly used chat GPT just cause its what I have been familiar with but it’s interesting to play around with perplexity AI, I can see the similarities. What I found AI to be really useful for during my practicum was to “gameify” subjects. Or to make popular or common games infused with a lesson I wanted to teach. I also like how to can tweak the level and difficulty of the games. I tried a few times to get the AI to pull directly out of the BC curriculum but I never quite found that it produced what I was looking for in my games. But, the great thing about AI is you can just ask it to make another iteration or version of the game and it takes very little time or work. Lastly many resources support learning through games like this article I read very recently.

An Example of what Chat GPT came up with when I got it to make me a game.

On the student side of things I had a few students try and use AI for some of the assignments I assigned during practicum. The good thing was they were very open about it and asked me if they could use it. In the end very few of them actually used it for anything they handed in. I think this was the case because the tasks I often got them to do were very specific to what we have just learn or what I had just taught them. The way I explained it to them was that AI is really good for the “fluff” of assignments, when being vague and general is required. But, when you are trying to be specific it’ll probably be quicker to just do the task yourself than to get AI to do it for you.

My new favorite song.