AI & “Prompt Engineering”

Mechanical Engineering Technology students in introductory programming courses for often struggle to learn the syntax and peculiarities of a programming language while also learning how to adapt it to meet their needs. AI is trained on the whole of the internet and there are many sources of programming knowledge to be found, including software repositories and discussion boards focused on programming languages. Because of this, ChatGTP, Github Copilot, and other AI platforms are generally very good at writing code, especially at the level required for introductory mechanical engineering technology courses. AI can easily write syntactically correct code snippets based on a student’s prompt that the student can then test to verify its functionality. This task has been referred to as “prompt engineering. ”Students learn and practice what needs to be included in their prompts to get code that provides their desired functionality. Prompts are edited and modified to eventually produce the desired output. Students may also manually edit the code generated via the AI prompt to reach their desired functionality.