Problem description:
AI is switched on by default in Teams for Edu. AI is turned on for all students by defualt.
Expected behavior:
AI shouldn’t exist if you want students to think about code on their own. At the very least I should be able to turn it off as a global option for all repls in the course. I frankly don’t care to ever see it in any course I teach.
Actual behavior:
Student has shown me that a loop they were trying to write where I wrote good specs, predictiably wrote itself, preventing that student from learning and finding out things for themselves.
Steps to reproduce:
Start any repl with default behaviour.
Bug appears at this link: https://replit.com/@ics3u-a-semester-1/Exc-6-The-Number-of-Roots-in-a-Quadratic-with-loops#main.py
I switched AI off in this repl, but I am unsure if that turns it off for everyone. If so, do I need to always remember to turn it off every time I start a lesson? Will my turning it off prevent students from turning it on? I don’t want students to access this feature in any way, shape or form.
Browser: Chrome OS: WIndows 10 Device (Android, iOS, NA leave blank): Desktop app version (Avatar menu->“Version”) or NA: Plan (Free, Hacker, Pro Plan): Teams for Edu
Hi - I just noticed this as well. Cool but not cool. It just wrote the entire function for my students when I wanted them to follow the algorithm. I need this turned off too.
I completely agree. And for clarity, I do understand that we can’t just stick our heads in the sand about this. AI is a useful tool and students need to be taught how to use it at some point. But beginner programmers will not find it helpful. It will just generate code that they will not understand.
This is an affront to the educational process. I agree that we can’t wait on it forever, but we have had no time to prepare for this or to study its effects.
I feel bad for any teacher that an assessment planned in the near future.
I, for one, am going to “pivot” (I hate that word) to another platform or something for my assessments on Thursday.
I don’t buy that anything “can’t” be disabled. It’s more like “won’t”. But if that is Replit’s position, I have to vote with my feet. I am really disappointed. There are other more promising environments out there like GitHub, and I will be looking at those kind of environments.
I am re-writing my quiz to paper and pencil. What other platforms are out there? I have spent countless hours and weeks trying to get my replit teams so that I could re-use something next year. I just can’t keep changing. It is exhausting. I have 4 different courses that I run on teams. I’m a high school teacher. These kids are newbies. I don’t want the AI for them.
I am with you 100%. I’m also high school (Ontario, Canada) and throughout the year I have 5 courses and a club. About half the students immediately got the red-devil eyes and jumped knee deep into the AI as soon as they saw it. I had used “Coding Rooms” in the past, but they’ve cancelled their education product.
The issue is profit. There’s very little profit in an education tool because education has no money. My budget is exactly $0. I’ve used Github in the past but the learning curve is massive for young newbies. Easiest way to scare young students away from coding is to make it complicated.
At this point I have instructed my students to turn it off but there’s no way for me to transition all my lessons and assessments to another platform right now. I’m not in the classroom tomorrow, so you just know they’re going to turn the AI back on. And the “check the history” comments - it’s not a possibility in terms of time.
The other harsh reality is that they can just open another tab and get the AI code from a personal account or some other AI tool. Cheaters are going to cheat and we’re making it increasingly easy for them. The “higher ups” would say to change the way we teach and create more open-ended, higher level work. That’s awesome but what if my creativity can’t think of that stuff? What if I feel in my heart of hearts that understanding the code and the syntax is crucial prior to taking the convenient shortcuts?
Maybe I’ll just quit, buy a shack in the woods, and watch the world burn around me.
https://pickcode.io is a new coding tool that’s got a visual/text based coding language that you can’t copy paste into – no AI autocomplete possible. There are a set of lessons on there that you can try out without an account and more that are available with an account.
100% agree. I would be glad to pay for the service if I could turn off AI team wide. Replit just basically did my students assignments for them today. Until then, I will be using a different platform starting today.
Can I ask whether the AI will use students’ answers to exercises to train its model. This would be a particular concern, because it would mean that students indirectly copy other students’ work. It would even more concerning if the AI was using answers submitted in a team to suggest answers for students in the same team.
