ChatGPT taught in schools?

[Biscuitsformeandyou]

Hi all, my primary aged DC is learning how to code simple games at school. ChatGPT/other models can generate the code for this immediately upon request. Do you agree that children should be taught how to best interact and utilise ChatGPT-like tools as this is inevitably the future?

This is a good point. And these fundamental principles have not changed.

They’re in primary school, they aren’t being taught to code, they’re using a package that helps them think logically about sequencing instructions and being precise. These skills are useful regardless of ChatGPT.

I think its best to think of coding (at least as far as education is concerned) as a foundational skill for learning about, understanding and exploring the computer science concepts and algorithms that underpin the modern world.

This, a thousand times over. We're at risk of losing skills, knowledge and critical thinking, with people blindly believing everything they read, whether or not it is accurate. Also without consideration of the motivation of the person or organisation that produced it.

It goes without saying that the negative consequences to society of that would be horrifying.

It’s not just useful for computing, logical thinking, being precise and sequencing is useful for other things like writing policies.

I know from teaching that if SLT write e.g. a new behaviour policy then the maths department are the best at finding gaps in it - e.g. ‘if the kid misses the detention, what is supposed to happen then?’ because as mathematicians we are trained to think like that.

I think we need to bare in mind the primary age of children. While I sort of see where the posters are coming from, I think we need to consider that not everything need to be taught right away or at a level of detail the posters are describing. When a child learns to run, we don't spend time teaching them about anatomy and physiology, gait, range of motions, the appropriate length of strike and foot positioning for effective running etc. We just let them give it a go. Should they develop interest in competitive running, we give them the rest of the skills.
I don't see writing game code on AI as any different. They may have zero interest in coding and are just experiencing the model for the fun of it. They may want to develop the interest which is where higher level skills come into play.
In short, I think it is marvelous that kids get to experience new things.

But that would be the argument for them learning scratch really.

Scratch isn't a serious programming language (though it is Turing complete) and to teach more complex computer science concepts one would want to use python or java or c++ or haskell depending on the concept at hand.

However children seem to find it fun. It teaches basic ideas about variables, sequence, selection and iteration and gets them to develop some problem solving skills.

I don't think getting chat gpt to spit out some scratch code will achieve any of the above.

The running analogy is perfect but not in the way you think - a child won't learn anything useful about running if all they do is ask a robot to run for them.

Or get a lift in a car.

Exactly. I remember the same conversations happening when computers started to become more accessible. AI is just another tool.

We are not using it in our schools because of safeguarding risks.

What are the safeguarding concerns, out of interest?

Yes but it's not either/or. You can learn to code and learn to use AI.

I am surprised so many people remember the days of interacting with computers before there were operating systems and high level programming languages....

I mean these things were quite widespread by the 1960s and 1970s and my understanding is that computer programming was pretty niche before that. I had a cool children's usborne book about how to write basic in the 1980s.

Joking aside, most high level languages are at just the right level of abstraction to be able to understand and apply the algorithms and computer science principles a student is learning about with out having to worry about the specific details of a microprocessor's architecture or memory management (though it can be interesting to learn a bit about that too)

Coding isn't obsolete. It is really important for them to learn the basics of coding, so they can understand what is going on. If they can only use chatGPT, how will they know whether the outputs are right or wrong?

But they are not learning the basic of coding. They are using a mediated interface, i.e. scratch. I appreciate that this is a slightly different point though

Again, Scratch teaches basics of coding such as variables, conditionals and loops. It doesn't teach all the concepts of modern programming languages any more than BASIC and Logo did when I was taught them in the 1980s, but it's an easy introduction to the most key concepts. That's what it's there for.

Any one of those languages would teach infinitely more about programming than asking ChatGPT to write you a program will.

'Things they will not need' sets the bar incredibly low. Is this defined in terms of a future job?

Scratch teaches kids the concept of controlling aspects of a game and some basic ideas about coding. It is meant to be fun and spark an interest in learning more at a later stage.

Like giving kids paint in art class and letting them paint for fun. Their picture quality won't look like a photo printed off the internet or generated by AI, but they are learning about the materials and what they can do.

It is also a bit of a stretch to say that starting to explore some of the ideas and concepts that underpin the modern world is obsolete.

To understand how machine learning works beyond a very superficial level you need to know maths and computer science. The demo code for a beginner tutorial to explore how a basic neural network works will usually be in python.

Obviously there has not and will never be a commercial need for employees to write programs in scratch. But I understand the market for handwritten stories about a day out at the seaside is not massive either.

I must admit in the past I have been skeptical about the value of scratch. But after reading this thread I asked a few of the talented young people I work with and it does seem to have inspired them to move on to pygame and then to generally develop an interest in maths and computer science.

Scratch and similar programming languages with a very low barrier to entry and where you get immediate results serve a valuable role. They're the gateway drugs to full-blown geekdom. They enable the shift from seeing a computer as an appliance, to seeing it as something you can get to do what you want.

Scratch teaches them the basic principles of coding. Read up on it, where it was developed etc.

Not all children need everything they're taught but without exposing all children to a wide variety of areas how will the engineers, the artists, the mathematicians, the linguists know?

You should start with learning coding before AI because how are you going to check the AI code or edit it if you don't know? How does asking AI to do spending for you expand your knowledge base?

I have to use a few AIs a lot at work. It’s extremely powerful compared to where it was even two years ago but I’ve yet to see one single thing produced that didn’t need to be checked by human eyes. It hallucinates facts, figures, gets emphasis slightly wrong. Not all the time, but sometimes. Even if it’s 95% accurate, the 5% that’s wrong is wrong in really unpredictable ways that need human judgment to spot, so it’s useless without skilled people. You need to learn those skills first. It absolutely will have a place in education but it’s not in primary school where the underlying skills are being taught. It’s also unlikely to remain free by the time these kids grow up.