[QuarterReptile]

I played with this a while after uploading one pdf chapter from the textbook I teach out of. The chapter covers text segment and stack dissection of simple C programs, as in rudimentary reverse engineering.

I was happy with many of the flash cards, but I struggle with the idea of encouraging my students to try it because I got 2 or 3 bad cards in the span of about 5 minutes. One tried to ask about an analogy in the text, but it reverse the order, butchering its meaning. One stated hat GDB would be useful for exploring logic and syntax, but not runtime, errors. And another posed a distinction without a difference, which would result in a lot of confused students and, consequently, busier office hours.

[tmpz22]

As a student I've been researching the use of AI for various tasks and have come to the initial conclusion that AI improves quantity but not quality such that a student is almost always better off spending an extra 30-60 minutes producing materials themselves.

A lot of tasks like note taking are essential to knowledge retention such that even supplementing notes with AI generated summaries creates clear tradeoffs that personally I choose to avoid.

I'm more curious in AI use by teachers to produce better media for student consumption, paired with tools like Figma, Adobe, Microsoft office, and other tools. In my experience teachers are forced to produce a lot of content, akin to content creators, without the proper incentives, quality controls, or training. I think AI can help there.

I think when paired with great tools, like Figma, then the quality/quantity trade-off of AI is changed. Perhaps there is a lesson there that can eventually be realized by students, but I haven't seen it yet.

[QuarterReptile]

In my undergrad engineering department, we see the biggest opportunity for improvement as being in lab sessions, where it's not reliably apparent who is wrong or struggling, and it takes a while to explain to each group what is wrong. We've had some luck feeding from student answers from our lab instructions into structured AI prompts that provide individualized feedback.

But that takes even more time to work on student material, which is not a highly rewarded way to spend one's time. Edit: plus, most of the time my experience is that lower-friction assignments result not in better-spent study time, but in less study time for my course.

[ziml77]

Notetaking in handwriting seems to be especially powerful for retention. Even when I had the option to type my notes in college, I kept on hand writing them (despite wishing since like middle school that I could type notes since extended writing with a pen cramps my hand).