The biggest dilemma that teachers are faced with these days is how to change the way they teach to keep students interested, challenged and motivated to think. One solution that can change this picture is project-based learning. From its inception, research has proven project-based learning to be one of the most effective ways to learn.
Given the transformative impact of AI on education and the need of teachers to rethink and redesign their instructional methods, project-based learning emerges as a compelling and viable approach to adopt. Investing time to master the various components of project-based learning could be the most effective strategy for addressing the unique challenges that AI has introduced into the educational environment.
In an authentic project-based learning environment, students are required to focus on solving a problem. Those problems are usually multidisciplinary and require students to identify its different disciplines, which are then assigned to different members in the team. Each team member conducts research and investigates their discipline, while making sure to collaborate with the other team members to coordinate their efforts towards their mutual goals. The entire endeavor is an exercise in good investigative, collaborative and management skills, that no AI tool can orchestrate for students. In project-based learning students need to take a leading role on the entire project and do the work themselves. However, by using AI tools to help their project, they can come up with a final product that is superior to what they would otherwise have without it.
One such tool is the Project Topic Advisor GPT that can assist students in developing effective driving questions for projects, generating the subjects their topic entails, and finding grade-appropriate resources. The Project Topic Advisor provides clarity about the question they need to solve, the topics they need to investigate to solve it and which resources they can rely on to research it. Using it helps students immediately embark on executing the project and feeling confident that they are being led in the right direction to solve the driving question. That can be a great relief for students because it can save them many false attempts to find the correct path to accomplish their goal.
Research can be very challenging for students and AI can help. There are AI-powered tools that can explore the internet, organize the data into digestible visualizations, and even format references correctly. One such AI research app is Genei, that will search the web for relevant content, offer suggestions to add new sources, crunches the content, offers a summary, extracts a list of common keywords along with all the images inside—and, to top it off, rounds up all the references to other work.
Another research tool that students can use is provided by Google. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is able to summarize articles that students are reading on the web. SGE can already summarize search results so that students don’t have to scroll forever to find what they are looking for and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping them out after they have actually clicked a link.
This can be a tremendous help for students because this is the part of project-based learning that most students fail on. Having access to a helper app that can find relevant resources, summarize them for the students and format the references correctly can free up students to focus on analyzing which materials will fit which parts of the project and how to analyze and synthesize everything they learned. All skills that require their executive faculty.
When the learning goal centers around working on a project or solving a problem, students utilize their investigative, collaborative and management skills, and employ their executive faculties, skills that no AI tool can orchestrate for them. However, by using AI, many project assignments that students used to struggle with, can become much easier to perform and free students to focus on what is important and interesting–coming up with a good solution or a good product.