Teaching Assistant GPT

 

I recently started teaching my daughter how to code in Python. We started with the basics and even though I am not an expert in Python, being a software engineer, gave us the capability to thread with some confidence together. I used an old book from my high school days, with simple assignments designed to be solved in Pascal. Regardless, the assignments are still usable for teaching. However after some time, I realized that every time I would leave my student to fly solo, she would reach to ChatGPT for the solution.

Of course, I would review the solutions and we would discuss them. Some solutions were good, some were good enough, and some did not work at all. Consequently in some of the cases, we searched for improvements together, whilst me explaining pieces of Computer Architecture along the way, just so she understands what is happening under the hood. Things moved along nicely. Now, I am facing a conundrum: Should I consider this cheating, if a student is asking ChatGPT for a solution? Is she going to get the best knowledge and skill set this way?

After some consideration I colluded the following: If used properly ChatGPT is a good book that additionally explains and answers your dumb questions. Then I remembered the days I was learning how to code, back then I was actually craving for someone to explain to me how a given peace of code works, or why "this is how its done". I'm not complaining, I had great teachers, but having a personal pocket knowledge booster, would have been awesome. Even though still a little flawed, I believe ChatGPT is the best interactive Wikipedia we currently have.

So, should we embrace it in teaching? Should we prevent students from using it? I think we should change our teaching approach. By using tools like GPT, students get kind of a shallow knowledge (more goal oriented), yet this is where our job as teachers begins. By asking the correct followup questions we can encourage deeper thinking and improving students knowledge. The solutions LLMs provide are a great stepping stone to improve upon, so removing them from education pro-forma is mistake, instead adjusting our position as teachers is the right direction.