TEACHING AND LEARNING CALCULUS WITH CHATGPT: BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS
João Pedro Cruz, Paula Oliveira, Isabel Cação · ICERI proceedings · 2023
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education is growing as AI-based technologies become more and more developed and there are free versions available online for any user. Large Language Models (LLMs)-statistical models that predict the next token from the previous ones using a large amount of data-have already demonstrated their usefulness as conversational agents in multiple domains, including education. The question-and-answer dialogue ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is one of the most popular LLMs that has been released. It has access to a massive amount of data that enables a wide range of linguistic relationships providing understandable contextualized natural language. Therefore, it shows apparently admirable capacities for educational purposes (in fact, it was noticed worldwide that it could pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam and scored highly on the Psychology Today Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence IQ Test). Facing this new reality, how should academia act? Is ChatGPT a threat or an opportunity? Several newspaper articles and scientific papers were devoted to this topic, concluding that, in general, ChatGPT can be beneficial if integrated into the teaching-learning process, as long as the student is aware of its limitations. In fact, it has been reported that ChatGPT often provides biased and even, in some cases, incorrect information, so the students must have this awareness and should take the results with a critical mind. This is particularly relevant in Mathematics, where ChatGPT has shown several weaknesses and failures. In this paper, we conduct an experiment on Symbolic Integration and consequent computation of areas of a geometric figure, as these are common topics of Calculus for both Mathematics and Engineering students of the first year. Our results enforce previous conclusions about the failure of ChatGPT and the necessity of suitable guidance when it is used for exercise-solving purposes. When integrated in the classroom, it could be an interesting and motivational tool for learning and teaching, as it can promote fruitful discussions between peers and student-teacher, fomenting critical thinking.