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Abstract

Abstract:

ChatGPT is an interactive chatbot that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand user input and generate responses. (Ruby, 2023) OpenAI.com released it in November of 2022, creating a buzz in many areas, including higher education. The focus of higher education on this new tool has primarily been academic dishonesty. Although this is a significant concern with ChatGPT, this paper focuses on its usage as a learning tool to help teach programming to management information systems students.

The paper’s brief literature review focuses on ChatGPT’s background and history. A study of how ChatGPT works at a high level is conducted, along with a walk-through of the process it uses to perform conversational modeling. (Ruby, 2023) Large language modeling is explained in terms that can be easily understood by management information systems students. After reviewing what ChatGPT is and how it works, the paper outlines and conducts an experiment using ChatGPT as a tool to assist students new to programming, in completing a simple programming assignment.

The experiment aims to see if a new programming student can use ChatGPT’s responses to complete the assignment. The experiment uses conversational prompts to describe the steps in the coding assignment and has ChatGPT return responses in the form of Python code blocks.

The paper describes each step in the process, including the prompts written and responses received from ChatGPT. This experimental assignment is to create a console application that will take input from the end user in the form of the user’s first name, last name, and year born. The input feature of the program must validate each piece of end-user data. This validation will be performed in conditional while loops. The program will then write the end-user data into a tuple that will also be stored in a list. An outer conditional while loop should terminate when the index reaches five (5) total tuples with individual end-user data in the tuples. Once all the data is entered, the program will process the data into unique usernames and evaluate the usernames for duplicates.

The preliminary results of this experiment will determine whether ChatGPT can be successfully used as a learning tool in assisting students in completing programming assignments. The prompts written for and the responses received from ChatGPT will be evaluated as to their usefulness and repeatability.

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