The students who had merely used ChatGPT as a search engine struggled to answer anything at all, while those who had refined their queries could give basic responses. The results were as predictable as the complaints that echoed around the classroom telling me that I couldn’t set tests without warning them. The challenge: Explain the predicted effects of global warming without notes or collaboration. They fine-tuned their prompts and engaged in a back-and-forth with the AI, resulting in two pages of engaging “chatting,” accompanied by succinct, digestible information.įeeling a little devious, I decided to spring an impromptu (and unrecorded) test on my students when they turned in their homework. They “chatted” with the AI, questioned it and they argued with it.

These were the rogue learners, the questioners, the bickerers, the challengers, the intelligent, hard-working minimalists. These students, however, that had the most engaging results. They prompted, “Answer as if you were a Year 8 student in less than 100 words.” These students received clear, understandable responses that they could at least skim and comprehend. They were a little more daring and refined their queries for comprehension. This group interestingly included most of the class’s most studious and high achievers. They plugged in the question, “What are the predicted effects of climate change?” and out came long, complex responses that they neither read nor understood. This group included those wary of the technology or ardent supporters of the minimalistic homework club, who treated ChatGPT like a search engine. Students broadly fell into three categories. The only condition was that underneath their copy and pasted answers, they also needed to copy and paste the instructions or prompts that they had typed into ChatGPT. However, I reassured them that for this homework, they were free to 'cheat' to their hearts’ content.

The fear of the unknown, the entrenched belief that AI tools like ChatGPT are off-limits or illicit, was palpable.

A chorus of “That’s cheating!” and “We aren’t allowed to do that!” echoed in the classroom. The initial reactions were both amusing and telling for how they perceived the use of AI in their own education. My assignment for the class was simple: Use ChatGPT to explain the predicted effects of climate change. The tool at the center of this experiment was not a globe, a map or an atlas, but ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. Artificial Intelligence (AI) in EducationĪs a geography teacher, I recently embarked on an experiment with my Year 8 class, an experiment that was met with equal parts laughter, curiosity and apprehension.

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