AI Asyet Another Tool in Undergraduate Student Projects: Preliminary Results

How do students use artificial intelligence tools in coursework projects when given the liberty to do so, with the only requirement of documenting how, where and why? We describe experiences with two groups of undergraduates in courses related to serious game authoring and human-computer interaction, both carried out in the second semester of 2023. In the serious games course, students were given the option of following a teacher-developed methodology for generating graphical assets for their serious games using a set of generative AI tools. This methodology was explained in the class but not hands on lab was carried out. In the interaction course, students were free to choose which AI tools to use when designing their system or in the development of their project documentation. Despite the limited number of participants (41 in total) we can see very different views and degrees of involvement: while some tried to use AI for as many tasks as possible, others considered that the learning curve for those tools was too steep to be worthwhile. Both experiences included a free-text survey at the end, and taken together, provide insights into how both supervised and unsupervised generative AI use could impact undergraduate projects in similar subjects. In addition to describing how students chose to use the tools, and the main takeaways from their survey response, we also discuss some of the ethical aspects about the access to the tools and what should be the minimal conditions to be met to allow the equitable use of AI in the classroom.