AI Blog Gabriella Gonzalez

   

AI Project Reflection

    The world of AI is all exciting and new, but also scary as is most of the unknown in this world. With AI software expanding and evolving daily, it’s natural to feel hesitant toward using or becoming aware of AI and how it works. Over the course of this class we discussed how AI impacts various areas of our daily lives like education, mental health, and various forms are art. 

    As a current undergrad student who hopes to one day pursue a grad school degree, the topic of AI in education was extremely interesting to me. It was fascinating to see how different areas of schooling can be affected by the growth and expansion of AI. While each cohort of grades and years or levels of education have their own way with AI, a lot of the concepts are quite similar. For example, AI is used at each and every level of education for personalized learning. In elementary and middle school we see students using AI to help them strengthen math skills or English and language arts skills. The students will answer various questions and based on how they answered, the software will provide them with new questions to help them strengthen the areas they are lacking stronger skills in. During the high school years, we see students use similar AI software that learns what the students understand and don’t understand to help them better their skill set while practicing for the ACT and SAT. The SAT and ACT have large strains on student mental health as it is such a draining exam and students put pressure on themselves to achieve the highest score possible with the mentality that this exam is the end all be all. Using AI software to help them practice will strengthen their skills and help them enter the exam feeling more prepared and secure. 

    In my own portion of the presentation, I found it quite useful to be researching how AI affects my level of education, undergrad, and grad school. I saw a lot of the positive components of AI overlapped with those positive components in lower levels of education in their own variation. Students in post-secondary education use AI that learns what they know to help them become more proficient in their field. We also see students across all grade levels sadly using AI as a short cut to cheat, not a tool to strengthen their skills. This benefits no one and only hinders the student’s educational journey. What I found most interesting about this was how students can use AI to pursue research projects and how professors can use AI in the modern classroom. With various forms of AI software, professors can use it to aid them in daily aspects of the classroom. One of these is plagiarism detection which is quite common now. This tool will help the professor who utilizes it detect students who use AI or plagiarize in their papers. Professors can also use AI to aid them in creating their lesson plans. If a professor creates a lesson plan and then runs it through AI for feedback, the AI software can share what could be added or removed from the lesson plan to make it stronger and more effective for the class. 

    What I enjoyed about listening to my peers’ presentations on different fields and how AI affects them was how they each took their approach and ran with it. No student in our class would be able to cover every aspect of how AI affects and is predicted to affect their respective assigned field, it’s just not possible. There is so much information out there, bombarding the class with all of it would just be ineffective and no one would truly grasp the project itself or its meaning/ purpose. My personal favorite was how Group Two formatted their presentation for this specific project, it really caught my eye. All groups did phenomenally and I feel like we all improved in some capacity from the first presentation earlier this term. 

    When looking back and reflecting on this project from start to finish, what I liked most about this experience is that we the students learned more about AI as it grows along with us. We are entering a work force as soon to be college grads, and this work force is already evolving because of AI. Having us participate in this project learning more about the many easy AI affects us each day and will continue to do so is extremely beneficial. As emerging young adults, being aware of how AI is currently being used in multiple fields and how it is predicted to be used later on in those fields can and will help us grow and adjust along with it making us stronger members of the work force and society as a whole.