Child on a beach

This exhibit was inspired by the conversation with my child’s learning support intervention. See full ChatGPT conversation here.

The prompt suggests a role, request instruction, parameters and a few concept conditions.

The response from ChatGPT was to write a pretty impressive story based on those parameters. The story developed a character “there was a young boy named Timmy” gave him some personality “He chose his favorite flavor, chocolate, and couldn’t wait to take a big lick” created a dilemma and a protagonist. ChatGPT becomes a little unhuman with the paragraph about “Beach Ball Bingo” and the happy ending is a little Hollywood “And from that day on, Timmy always looked on the bright side and never let a little setback like losing his ice cream get him down.”

The interesting thing about ChatGPT though is that this is a conversation meaning that previous chats can be expanded, The AI model can use the previous responses to build a conversation.

This further refinement of the conversation by the next prompt does produce a revised seemingly age appropriate story, while retaining most of the ‘original’ story.

The story review questions are valid and phonic outline is a fair attempt, however a little weak.

I then wanted to expand, though this is not my subject area and see if ChatGPT could expand this piece of ‘original text’ into something more educational.

You can see the full response here, its a little long to provide the image, so I will focus on my thoughts around the response. Firstly the tool provides a fairly comprehensive lesson plan outline, setting out learning objectives, materials, procedural instructions as well as timing. Without prompting (though it may have learnt my style) it provides also some examples for assessment and extension.

I pursued the conversation further by suggesting the use of the CUSP method, as suggested by a teacher in my son’s school.

The response even for a non subject teacher seemed a little weak

You can read more about the CUSP curriculum here. What ChatGPT suggested was not an application of that learning strategy from what I could see.

So I decided to push the model further and asked the following

You can review the full response here, (scroll to the bottom) but in summary I believe that ChatGPT had no specific knowledge of the CUSP strategy and simply made one up. It reads quite plausibly as a strategy and as a teacher training presentation.