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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work

You're swimming against the riptide. If I were teaching coding today, I'd allow, even encourage, use of AI, with some ground rules. Students using AI would have to show their work (i.e. the conversation with the machine).

The content of the prompts and in particular follow-up questions, can demonstrate competence. E.g. situations in which the student spotted that something was wrong in the generated code and made an intelligent hint to the machine to fix it.

Students should be prepared for tomorrow's world, not yesterday's.

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By that logic wouldn’t it be ok for grade schoolers to use calculators when they are learning basic math? Sure you can teach someone how to get an answer, but have you actually given them an understanding of the material to be built upon?

Kids should be using calculators in kindergarten. You can discover a lot of curious things about the numbers with calculators. Like when you multiply by 5 and keep doing it, the last two digits are always 25, and the hundreds digit bounces between 1 and 6. You can discover that without a calculator, but it's more time consuming.

If we want to ensure kids can do arithmetic without calculators, we can have exams in which there are no calculators.

You can give them homework problems in which they have to fill in all the work steps of multiplication and long division, e.g.:

       ______
   17 | 2091
       -__
         __
        -__
          __
          __

If you want to ensure that the students know and follow a certain process in obtaining an answer, you can't just test the production of an answer. You have to white box it.

Kids should know time tables to about 12. Beyond that, you can test whether they know the structure of long multiplication and division and such.

“If we want to ensure kids can do arithmetic without calculators, we can have exams in which there are no calculators.”

Which is exactly what the parent was trying to do with a an exam that forbade the use of AI.

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