Codio recently held a webinar to preview new interactive courseware for teaching with Generative AI and walk through how to integrate industry-standard Generative AI APIs with Codio.
Why Teach with Generative AI?
Low student engagement and high entry barriers are perennial challenges for computing educators. Research conducted by Codio shows that over half of educators are concerned about student engagement levels. Incorporating AI into programming or computing instruction is one way to boost student excitement and engagement, and Codio's interactive, editable, Generative AI course modules make it easy to do so.
Teaching with Codio's Generative AI Courseware and Industry-Standard APIs
Our Generative AI courseware enables students to build and hone skills that will boost their career readiness by developing generative AI-powered movie recommendation generators, chatbots, and image-generation programs. The courseware includes introductions to GPT, ChatGPT, and DALL-E and teaches students how to optimize outputs, build parameters, code with generative AI, and more. Also, the only prerequisite for the Generative AI course materials is an Introductory Python course.
In Codio, instructors can also use VS Code and Copilot, for example, or other API calls; one of Codio's great features is the ability for students to use environment variables, so they don't have to go into OpenAI (or other generative AI APIs). Students can pull their API key from the environment variables menu in the Codio platform.
Easy to configure and access
Codio's Generative AI courseware is designed to be not only exciting to students but easy to access. Educators often flag accessibility or barriers to access as an issue in computing education, but Codio intentionally builds courses with low entry barriers to make education more accessible. Learners only need to connect to the internet log in to Codio, and they can take the course.
Codio's ease of access also decreases the time an instructor spends as tech support for students, as built-in auto graders and feedback take some burden off instructors while still helping students succeed. Applicable for various types of students like software engineers, data science engineers, and even math students, Codio's Generative AI courseware will teach learners the basics of coding with AI. They will master the fundamentals to connect their code with AI, enabling creativity through app creation, coding automated feedback, or even book generation.
Course Breakdown
The generative AI courseware is broken into three subcategories, GPT Text to Text, GPT Text to Code, and Dall-E: Text to Image, all within the Codio platform.
The text-to-text text is covered with GPT-3 API calls; for text-to-image generation, we have DALL-E calls with the Python imaging library, and for text-to-code, we use the ChatGPT API. The different possible assignments enable students to use creativity and work on projects that are meaningful for them, for example, choosing what kind of information to input for the AI to respond to.
Demo
Codio's Generative AI editable courseware is designed to give instructors the resources and materials to guide students from an introductory-level understanding of Python to being comfortable making API calls and integrating generative AI into their programming projects.
Learners are consistently presented with clear learning objectives so the students know what will be covered. In the Codio platform, you can see every topic that's covered. For example, we take the students through large language models, teach them about OpenAI, how to set it up, and even render code inside Codio. Additionally, every section in these course materials includes a summative exercise.
Assignment Example
With their knowledge from Intro to Python, your students will be comfortable making API calls, understanding temperature, max token, and presence penalty, and being able to include and factor all of those into the projects they create in the future.
Codio's Generative AI courseware enables instructors to teach students how to engage with AI in various ways, like text-to-text and text-to-image capabilities. The Generative AI courseware ensures students understand the basics before moving to more complex topics, asking simple questions to build understanding and ending units with an exercise to retain engagement.
Learners have the opportunity to practice tweaking the API to generate practical and defined outputs, such as movie recommendations with text-to-text. Instructors can give learners hands-on experience with the Python imaging library and OpenAI's DALL-E to generate images. The courseware also includes lessons on simple editing and creating variations of images using AI and more complex tasks like animating generated images, image composition and blending, app creation, and monitoring and analyzing ChatGPT API usage and performance.
Conclusion
With the Generative AI courseware, students can go from intro-level knowledge to understanding how to work with AI in their coding. Emphasizing accessibility and customizability, the courseware aims to enhance the learner and instructor experience. Students will learn to engage with text-to-image, text-to-code, and generative AI tools while building valuable skills and mastering the basics.
