Beyond a class I took about coding in R in my undergrad, I have not done much with coding or programming. However, this week, two of my classes had workshops on the topic. In our science teaching course, volunteers from Science Venture came into our classroom to do a workshop on programming with Micro:bit. Simultaneously, we worked on programming with Scratch in this class.

If I had the resources in my class to do programming, I would integrate these programs into my curriculum in a few different ways.

Connections to Important Tech

In my class, I would like to help my students understand all of the simple computers that help us in our day-to-day lives. When we worked with Micro:bit, I was struck by the features that allowed us to program the Micro: bit into a compass that would display certain messages when pointed in the cardinal directions.

Immediately, I started thinking about the ways that we could use this tech to explore the tech that has become ubiquitous in wilderness adventure like transceivers that backcountry skiers use for safety in avalanche country or GPS devices that allow expeditions to send out an SOS signal from areas where there is no cell phone service.

Gratitude Through Programming

One of my core beliefs in education is that students will be more grateful for the technology and resources they have when they know the work that goes into creating those resources.

I think that it would be a great curricular connection to explore GPS units just like we would explore any other outdoor technology like skis, stoves, or tents. If we know the people who created this technology and the work that they put into making it available for us, we can fully grasp the privilege that comes with using these technologies.

When I was a student, I worked at my university’s writing center. In this job, I learned to edit student work, helping first year students edit their first assignments and supporting masters’ students as they edited their thesis. I noticed that students persistently made the same mistakes and struggled to edit their own work.

Although talking in class about ChatGPA made me a little worried for the future of plagiarism, it also inspired me to think of new ways to help students learn editing skills.

When students are assigned essays they are often so exhausted by their topic that by the time they reach the editing stage, they find that they have no energy to read their essay over. With ChatGPA, student can instantly create an essay on any topic they like and spend the majority of their time working on editing the essay.

At this moment, it seems like ChatGPA and other AI content generating software represent the direction that school is moving. And if that is true, then teachers need to radically rethink technology in the classroom. Teachers need to help students work collaboratively with AI, rather than competing with it.

However, the future is far from set in stone. Sometimes, designing curriculum feels like writing science fiction. We are reaching forward with our words, trying to imagine a world that has never existed before.

When I think about curriculum development, I feel torn between preparing students for the future that will come if society follows current trends and the best possible future that I could hope for for my students. I want to believe that if I keep both of these in mind, my students will be prepared for a future somewhere between those two poles.

All of this is to say that although I am a bit of a tech resistant curmudgen who wants to teach her students to start fires in the woods and knit, I suppose that AI is here to stay, and I believe that using ChatGPA to teach editing skills will equip our students for the science fiction future we are writing.