Thanks to Facebook memories and a link that was almost a dead link I reread a post on my old blog – How To Read Code. It got me thinking about Artificial intelligence writing code. What? Let me explain.
If students are going to use AI to write code they are going to have to know how to read and understand it. There are several reasons for this. One is that AI almost never write 100% of the code necessary for a project. Without being able to read and understand the generated code students will be unlikely to be able to take the project to the finish.
Reading code for understanding can also be helpful to learning more about computer science. Not just coding but computer science. Code is the language of CS but there is a lot more to understanding computer science than just writing code.
AI systems have been trained on a wide variety of code samples from a wide variety of developers with a wide variety of coding styles. That means that students reading AI generated code, potentially, have exposure to more styles and techniques than their instructors are likely to show them.
Having students read explain the code they read can be a powerful tool for their learning and for teachers to use for evaluation. Keeping students from asking the AI to write the explanation is probably a good idea though.
All of this makes me think about code reviews (Archived blog post on that - The Art of the Code Review) Organizing code reviews may also be a good teaching tool. Reviewing student code, AI generated code, or perhaps publicly available code examples on the internet. If AI can train on other people’s code why not students?
I am wondering what having an AI explain student code would look like. Would it help students understand their own code better? It might. I have seen a lot of students tossing different code snippets into a project hoping it would work but not really understanding what the code was doing. Would it also help them understand the process of reading code? Interesting idea I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment