Ryan C Cooper - Generative AI in Engineering Education: A Tool for Learning | SciPy 2025

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping engineering education by offering students new ways to engage with complex concepts and content. Ethical concerns including bias, intellectual property, and plagiarism make Generative AI a controversial educational tool. Overreliance on AI may also lead to academic integrity issues, necessitating clear student codes of conduct that define acceptable use. As educators we should carefully design learning objectives to align with transferrable career skills in our fields. By practicing backward design with a focus on career-readiness skills, we can incorporate useful prompt engineering, rapid prototyping, and critical reasoning skills that incorporate generative AI. Engineering students want to develop essential career skills such as critical thinking, communication, and technology. This talk will focus on case studies for using generative AI and rapid prototyping for scientific computing in engineering courses for physics, programming, and technical writing. These courses include assignments and reading examples using NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, etc. in Jupyter notebooks. Embracing generative AI tools has helped students compare, evaluate, and discuss work that was inaccessible before generative AI. This talk explores strategies for using AI in engineering education while accomplishing learning objectives and giving students opportunities to practice career readiness skills.