Why is the sky blue?

So this is my first exploration of ChatGPT as an educational tool. This was triggered by my children asking me a question on a long car ride. You can see the transcript result here let’s call it “Why is the sky blue”.

As a parent we are often presented by our children with questions that we cannot answer. Well in this case could partially answer but I wanted to get this right, so I typed it into ChatGPT, instead of googling it.

From previous times with ChatGPT, I had picked up that the model works best when you frame your ‘prompt’ in certain ways. So, I used the following “help me to explain to my children ages 7 and 10 “Why is the sky blue”

The tool seems to respond well if you provide a framing to the purpose, in this case “Help me to explain” also the inclusion of my children’s “children ages 7 and 10” ages provides a parameter to set the level of response. Then of course the context “Why is the sky blue”

With this exercise not only did I as a parent receive an age-appropriate answer for my children. However that was it, I asked a question and received an answer. Did any learning occur?

So I dug a little deeper

I was then able to obtain some further resources which we could watch together at home.

Unfortunately these were not linked or illustrated in any way, so we went off to google and had a look as a family and watched a few of the videos and conducted our own learning prompted by our inquiry into this subject.

In conclusion during this mini family learning episode we were able to apply a number of elements of the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs such as finding, locating, outlining, relating, articulating, examining, illustrating, reviewing, evaluating etc.

Now me as a parent should could have probably known ‘why the sky is blue’ from my own studies as a child as after all I was not bad at science. However I could not remember the full elements of this information in order to give an accurate answer to my children, so I needed to look it up. I do know a friend who would have been able to do this off the top of their head…

What I learnt with this exercise is that 5 people learnt something that day. And Dad got to look like a rock star without taking too much time out of my family day in order to develop all of that.