AI helps college students skip proper to the great things on this intro programming course

Uncommon Courses is an occasional sequence from The Dialog U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to educating.

Title after all:

“Be taught AI-Assisted Python Programming”

What prompted the concept for the course?

Generative AI is really good at computer programming – to the purpose the place the way in which we educate and assess college students who’re studying to program should change.

We used to provide college students dozens or a whole lot of small focused programming duties, drilling every side of the syntax – the phrases and symbols – of programming. That labored properly as a place to begin, besides now generative AI instruments can resolve all of those issues. Educators can attempt to ban these instruments (good luck with that!), or embrace them. We selected to embrace them in our new course, the place college students be taught to program – supported by a generative AI assistant.

What does the course discover?

The course re-imagines what studying to program means now that generative AI is accessible to deal with extra of the low-level syntax points which have traditionally slowed down and pissed off college students. The extra college students battle with finicky syntax particulars, the much less time and vitality they’ve to perform their programming-related targets like beginning a enterprise, writing apps for social good, or contributing to initiatives which can be significant to them.

Generative AI clears the decks for us to deal with extra precious, high-level abilities that college students must turn into efficient programmers. For instance, generative AI struggles to resolve massive issues; we nonetheless want people to divide these issues into bite-sized chunks – a course of referred to as downside decomposition – every of which AI can resolve properly. Individuals are nonetheless wanted to check code to make sure it’s doing what was supposed, and to make sure that the code is used to assist, not hurt, society and its susceptible teams.

Why is that this course related now?

Skilled programmers in droves have already adopted generative AI instruments and are utilizing them to be extra environment friendly of their every day work. If the aim is to arrange college students for these jobs, academics want to coach them in easy methods to use these new instruments.

Maybe extra importantly, what college students can do in introductory programs adjustments. With a extra highly effective device comes a capability to work at higher, more efficient levels. These instruments save individuals time.

What’s a essential lesson from the course?

A essential lesson is that generative AI is spectacular, however that it’s fallible. You can’t merely ask it for code and assume that the code it offers you is ideal. It might not do the correct factor. It may produce errors, or bugs. It might trigger safety issues. It might exclude underrepresented teams or discourses. It’s essential to critically look at the code that you just get from generative AI.

What supplies does the course characteristic?

The course is constructed on our new guide “Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming.” The guide reconceptualizes an introductory programming course within the context of generative AI instruments.

The principle device used within the guide and in our course is known as GitHub Copilot, which is like ChatGPT for programmers. College students use Copilot from day one. They construct full apps: apps to automate tedious, error-prone duties; laptop video games; even an app to guess who wrote a novel whose writer could also be unknown. To make sure that college students are nonetheless studying fundamentals, the guide teaches them easy methods to perceive the code that the generative AI is creating.

What is going to the course put together college students to do?

Some college students take an intro programming course to begin their laptop science main. For these college students, we proceed to show evergreen abilities like code studying and code testing, however now additionally introduce the higher-level ability of downside decomposition so college students can resolve bigger duties than ever earlier than.

The vast majority of college students within the course, although, are learning different disciplines like sociology, psychology, enterprise, engineering and science. The course prepares these college students to make use of generative AI to spice up their careers via programming.