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Yesterday a student came to me with project questions. She was trying to learn some ground-level tool basics (how useState works in React, but details don’t matter), and she was just hopelessly confused: the pieces were there, fragments of nascent understanding littered all around, but somehow it just wasn’t coming together for her.
She walked me through her fragments of non-working code, and as I was trying to figure out how she’d got so lost, she popped back to her documentation source:
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ChatGPT.
I had her type “react usestate” into a search engine and showed her how to identify the React project’s •actual documentation• in the search results.
She looks at it. A long pause. Then: “This is SO much better.”
After who knows how many hours of struggle, she was unstuck in 5 minutes.
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ADDENDUM:
Worth mentioning that in addition to being a relatively new developer, this student is an English language learner. Both the code and the prose take mental effort. She’s doing a hell of a lift here! (Humans are amazing.)
Nothing has taught me more about writing documentation than watching students read documentation. It’s eye-opening.
If you’re a tool vendor: find a capable student / new junior dev, and shut up while you watch them read your docs. It will be…instructive.
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Many students wouldn't have been brave enough to ask for help. They'd give up & drop out.
In the future, how many students will have their educations thwarted or disrupted by ChatAI?
@Npars01
We’ve worked hard to create a context where students •can• ask for help — which means structure, psychological safety, positive social relationships, low student/teacher ratio, etc etc — and yes, the positive effects are numerous. It takes real work at all the levels of an educational institution. ChatAI’s flaws are there to prey on weak institutions, ed and biz.