This has been an issue with schools since forever. Focusing on grades instead of learning means many kids will do what is needed to get a good grade, pass the class and get the degree.
When we stop valuing grades and start valuing knowledge directly, learning improves. Knowledge should be the reward and what we laud. The grade is just a mechanic for evaluation, but should be considered no value in itself. That’s what kids need to be taught and shown from day one.
When your kid comes home from school, ask them what they learned. Ask them to teach you as if you don’t know, or maybe you really don’t. Don’t correct them, instead ask questions that might lead them to the correct answer, if you know it. People learn best by teaching others. When you give your kid the expectation that they will be teaching you what they learned, even casually, they pay attention in class and do much better.
It’s much better than doomscrolling tiktok for both of you, trust me.
Grades are the measure of kids are progress in what learning and what knowledge they actual have, you can call it something else like in Montessori where they change the system of grading where they use terms like mastery but they still have a system in place to track progress.
I think you’re confusing grades with teaching to the test, thanks No Child Left Behind btw, here which okay is a very valid point but end of they day standardized tests are a way to measure your actual grasp of the material being taught. Sure, how you get there needs adjustment at least in America where our math scores and reading comprehension scores are abysmal but to say it’s grades is the issues is kind of reductive when it’s such a more complex issue that involves how we teach, how we deal with disparate incomes, new thing is low enrollment, and why the hell aren’t we teaching phonics when whole-language and three-cueing methods are proven to be ineffective for literally decades now.
There’s a reason why colleges are moving back to requiring ACT/SAT scores in their applications again because in particular with items like math, kids were graduating and then finding out that they didn’t understand basic concepts like Algebra.
Also, this conversation has nothing to do with the article and AI.
you can’t measure knowledge though.
schools teachers and students are measured, they are judged by numerical performance metrics.
also, after grammar school parents have no clue what their kids are doing or learning. most adults can’t do algebra or read beyond a 7th grade level.
plus what you are implying would require massively more teachers and time in education, something nobody wants.
Make them write out the pseudo code by hand for thier projects? from what I can gather, the issue is that they don’t understand the underlying code that the Ai created? Thus bug testing or altering values manually is not in thier wheel house?
I’m not an expert on this matter but I don’t hear anything about pseudo code, which allows you to write code for anything… Just got to translate it into code/a language that the computer can use?
How do you mark that? You can’t just give them a zero
Yes you can; it’s easy. Make the policy clear that any generative AI use will result in disqualification of the whole team. Then enforce it.
disqualification of the whole team.
Oh fuck no. I’ve been stuck on teams with deadweights before. Teachers refused to do anything about them contributing nothing at all. Still pissed that asshole graduated.
I swear group assignments are probably the best exposure to real-life work that the school can offer. You will run into people just as lazy throughout your life. Better to recognize them early on and come up with a plan for dealing with them.
administration won’t let you do that. you will lose your job if you try to fail students.
they will force you to pass students.
also a lot of parents straight up bribe teachers now for grades.
Who the fuck enrolls in an educational course, if they wish to skip learning?
Increasingly higher ed in america is being treated as a degree mill, where students are “customers” and the degree is a “product.”
It’s disgusting, but it’s a natural consequence of a commodified education system in which colleges and universities are treated as businesses.
I personally think we need to cut out the parasitic administrators and let the department faculty run the schools like co-ops, and possibly hire out the few administrative tasks that are actually necessary.
That would be far cheaper than paying these enormous administrative salaries, so it could lower tuition while increasing faculty pay.
But has anyone considered those poor shareholders?
Wn also need to address companies gutting any internal training programs and then gate keeping jobs that really have no need for a college degree behind a requirement for any bachelor’s degree at all to be eligible for consideration. There’s way too many jobs that that in my father’s time had a 6 month probation period where they taught you the basics of a trade, where now they just contract college grads and hope a BA means they can figure it out on their own, in lieu of having proper in house training programs.
There are a lot of people who don’t really have any need for, or even interest in, a higher education who are going just because it’s become the bare minimum to get an okay job through this inflation of requirements for entry level positions. They get saddled with debt they don’t need (and can likely I’ll afford), while the curriculum gets dumbed down for everyone, in order to keep the schools’ numbers looking good.
To be clear, this isn’t a knock on any of these folks. I just think there need to be more viable routes to a career with a living wage for people who don’t want to go to university. Maybe they come back later in life, maybe they don’t, but they should still be able to find a job that affords them a dignified life.
As all the others say, they want the cert and the status that comes with the cert.
It’s part of the reason everyone needs three years experience for an entry level job, a good student fresh out of education is worth little but then worth a lot if they learn fast. A bad student fresh out of education won’t learn at all and will be an active detriment, if only because they’re taking a seat someone better could take.
People who use AI for everything aren’t guaranteed to be bad students, but bad students probably will use AI for everything. The trick will be figuring out the difference.
Yeah, ultimately I think the root of the problem is how much HR is part of hiring and selection processes despite not really knowing how to evaluate the specific skills required to do the job. If skills were being evaluated rather than resumes and interview skills, then cheating your way to a degree would be pointless.
Oh, you’d be surprised.
I used to teach english for non native speakers, and after chatgpt’s debut in 2023, almost every single essay, homework, and presentation was entirely done with LLMs. We had to demand handwritten essays, and presentations had to be done in the classroom (we gave the theme, they worked out a presentation, and then presented it the same day without leaving the class).
And even then, some students would ask to go to the bathroom, use their phones, memorize a whole ass paragraph from chatgpt and then come inside class to write it down.
Just for the cert or whatever at the end.
most people hate learning. because it’s difficult and requires effort and time.
cheating is easy. you get results with less time or effort.
The mentally bankrupt
Wools that just want the cert
honestly, if you live in a western nation, this is probably your only way to aactually succeed in the game industry. I don’t blame them. Its disgusting, but it is what it is.
I can forgive the modern reliance on LLMs, but anyone creating software still needs to understand how it actually works, or else it will come out as garbage. Games are no exception.
So i imagine if a student doing a video game course is doing it because they are passionate about gaming, and these students are willing to use AI to shortcut something they actively want to do, then its not a big leap to assume they are using it to deal with all the other subjects they find tedious.
I feel like we are heading for a future of flesh robots interfacing with the internet to steer their lives, and the second the internet goes down people will be wandering around aimlessly, looking dazed in an internal conflict between wondering where to start and being confused that the black glass in their hand cant give them answers.
ugh,we’re so fucked
Stupid in, stupid out applies to teaching as well. 🥲
I work in software. Have for 29 years. There will be no one writing software very soon. Like it or not, seems the ship has sailed. The company I work for has a goal of 100% AI generated code within the next 18 months. So might as well give these kids an A, I guess. It’s not going back to the old way.
People were similarly pig-headed when the first compilers came out. History repeats itself but it’s not really surprising that antis don’t know that or care.
2 decades game dev exp – yup. and there’s lot of software out there already thats production ready which will pump out game assets off of word prompts. hell they will spit out full games. people have gone from creators to reviewers.
Another software engineer of 25 years here. I’m really surprised to see how badly you’ve been downvoted here for simply telling the truth. I suspect anyone who downvoted you either hasn’t used a paid frontier AI model to write code (so they think the free browser-based models are as good as it gets), assumes you’re pro-AI, or simply jumps on the AI-bad-downvote train.
For anyone that downvoted, tell us, why? Let’s have a conversation about it. Us software engineers are on the bleeding edge of this seismic shift. We’re seeing firsthand what it’s capable of, and how fast it’s improving. It doesn’t mean we’re in favour of the AI companies, or ram shortages, or data centers being rolled out in your backyard, or being turned into engineering team leads overnight. It’s been thrust into our lives just like yours, but if we don’t use it we’re throwing away a massive productivity boost and one of the most transformative technologies of the last few decades.
It’s a rare opportunity someone actually asks for a conversation, so let’s have one.
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First of all, “no one writing software” taken literally, is simply not true. People still write in all sorts of obsolete / obscure programming languages, mostly for fun, though occasionally there’s reasons why one might want to in a real world scenario. To me, code is art. You cannot stop art.
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If we’re talking figuratively, when it comes to the “professional” software development. I’m not familiar with this side of things, but here’s my opinion: A lot of the industry has been churning out slop long before AI became a thing. Keeping the gears turning. Making changes nobody’s asked for. Buying up and destroying smaller companies. All in the name of profit and infinite growth. This is bad, AI or not.
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From what I’ve seen, you at the very least still need experienced programmers to review and guide the AI, otherwise you’ll quickly run into unmaintainable, possibly insecure code. But proliferating AI coding will lead to nobody building that experience.
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“Insecure code? But just let AI write test cases and review it for security flaws!” It might be good at catching some errors humans make when writing code, but if you spin this to its extreme, you will end up with AI cheating to satisfy the security tests, rather than actually writing secure code.
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And you say productivity, but all I see is waste. Many people on your side of the fence desperately want to avoid having to label your “work” as being made with AI, because it’s not a good look. People don’t want slopware. AI is good at creating things quickly. To make a lot of noise, drowning out the signal. But in the end it’s just something flashy without substance or longevity.
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AI is great if you want people further driven away from their fellow humans and into content addiction, with a short attention span, that can barely think for themselves. In the end, it’s the perfect tool for fascism.
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So, ask yourself: Who actually benefits from this?
I’m not rejecting all that (generative) AI can do. There’s certainly some things that appears to be useful as a tool, in the right hands, for the right context. But the post you’re defending is pushing things to an extreme. And would you know, AI companies themselves are just as extreme. It’s a figurative suicide cult, if not a literal one.
I could go on. And it’s a bit all over the place. But anyway, this is why you’re experiencing a lot of pushback in some online spaces.
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I see this sentiment constantly and I’ve yet to actually see a single example of AI generated codebase that I’d consider on par with anything but a mediocre one written by humans. You want me to appraise the quality of a product? Show me something that’s high quality, 'cause all I can see right now is billions being poured into products racing from incoherence towards mediocrity.
I think it’s worth remembering that most of humanity hasn’t been involved in anything resembling meaningful productive work for many decades.
From this, we can conclude that the general state of our society, including education, will not be impacted by the introduction of AI, it already sucks.
We didn’t ‘start failing our children’ in 2027, we started failing them in 1927, and more likely we have never NOT failed to educate people in how to not suck.
I wish more people of good conscience would take changes and work towards applying them meaningfully instead of letting the absolute worst people take maximum advantage of whatever advantage could be had of whatever change is coming.
I don’t agree with this standpoint but I have a genuine question for you and the others in this thread, assuming you’re right: what should we be teaching kids, instead of coding? If the norm becomes not writing code by hand, what would the degree look like that gets you into one of these AI jockey jobs? Do we still teach DSA? Design patterns? Does Programming: AT&T to
3 == "3"get a one-lecture spotlight between punchcard machines and transformer architectures?Or in the long run are you expecting that the entire software industry will essentially become a nontechnical one, and just be middle managers building things directly?
Systems, design patterns, technical experience, and just what good looks like. You need to know how the sausage is made, because you can’t get the best results from an AI model without knowing when the result is good.
And that’s actually really hard without experience, community, and ongoing criticism and learning.
Hey thanks for replying! It’s a great question, and one I don’t have a good answer for.
My immediate gut instinct is that we SHOULD still be teaching kids coding, and everything else that was on their curriculum previously. Just as calculators helped us work faster, we still want to understand what they’re doing. Even if AI can augment or replace some of our knowledge in future, it’s still important to think for yourself and be able to vet what you’re generating with AI. But this is an answer built around what’s happening right now, not tomorrow.
When I think about an answer in relation to my experience over the last year, it feels a lot more hopeless, at least to me. I don’t think we’re going to know what adults should be focusing on in the short term, let alone what kids are learning for their future careers.
The situation is changing so rapidly in my workplace (at least for software engineers) that AI workflows we were using 3 months ago feel ancient. By not being on the latest frontier model, we’re losing productivity. We’re all rolling our own custom software to speed up our personal workflows. It’s faster and cheaper to do this in many cases than to buy an off-the-shelf product and learn/master it.
So already, I feel like the days of companies selling software subscriptions feels very numbered. Adobe and Atlassian are going to have their business model completely destroyed IMHO. But that’s not even the scary part.
Have a look at the number of Linux CVEs found this year compared to previous years - it’s humbling. Governments are paying very close attention, and export controls on AI models are in full swing. They’re very capable cyberweapons.
So the future I’m seeing is an incredibly uncertain one for everyone due to the exponential nature of it all, both from a geopolitics standpoint as well as a career standpoint for many industries. Last year I thought we were somewhere through the hype cycle and it was starting to slow down, but now I’ve had more hands on experience with the frontier models, these days I’m thinking we’re still at the beginning of an exponential curve, an explosion of change that’s going to happen so fast many of us will struggle to cope, and our slow legal and economic systems will struggle to keep up.
I think a lot of people are just assuming it’ll all blow over once the bubble pops, but like all the other bubbles, it’s formed because there is a very real technological leap happening, and it’s not going away.
So right now I’ve never been more sure of one thing: that it’s harder than ever to see what’s coming. So to try and answer your question just feels impossible, it’s all still moving too fast.
Perhaps on reflection one thing we should be teaching our kids is the importance of continued learning and bettering ones self. I fear the world is in for a rough decade from all this (not to mention climate change and late-stage capitalism), and anything we can do to prepare our kids to roll with the punches in that future would be wise.
Thanks for such a detailed response. I suppose asking you to essentially predict the future of this particular industry was a bit ambitious.
My immediate gut instinct is that we SHOULD still be teaching kids coding
As is mine, which for me I think, even if I take it as read that LLMs are the future of programming, comes from the same place that makes me think in spite of Python, programming courses should start with C. But it’s become pretty obvious to me that a lot of people don’t have that desire to “go under the hood”, and still seem to manage, so part of me thinks maybe the same will become true of LLM users.
these days I’m thinking we’re still at the beginning of an exponential curve
a lot of people are just assuming it’ll all blow over once the bubble pops, but like all the other bubbles, it’s formed because there is a very real technological leap happening, and it’s not going away
I’m one of the people you called out who “hasn’t used a paid frontier AI model to write code” (though I didn’t downvote), so I have to take your word for it re the rate of change, but it does seem a little contradictory to me to believe we’re on an exponential slope but also in a bubble. I guess the former is from a technological perspective and the latter financial?
Have a look at the number of Linux CVEs found this year compared to previous years - it’s humbling.
That’s one of the things that has pushed me away from the intensely skeptical end of the spectrum. But I don’t really see how this can fail to flatten out eventually. While secure software is possible at all (by which I suppose I mean cryptography, hardware, and airgaps still work as advertised), I think if anything AI will simply accelerate us towards an equilibrium, where the supply of vulnerabilities that can be found by LLM-guided brute force search is patched and exhausted.
I fear the world is in for a rough decade from all this … and anything we can do to prepare our kids to roll with the punches in that future would be wise.
Pretty bleak. But I definitely agree.
Regarding the frontier models, there’s a idea called Karpathy’s Funnel which notes the massive difference in experience with AI models. It funnels the population of the world like this: (borrowing a lot from a Karpathy tweet with some paraphrasing)
- 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs.
- 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and AI slop, to this part of the world the whole thing feels crazy still.
- 20M people (0.2%) see frontier-grade LLMs, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. You typically need a budget to get this experience. There are multiple levels in this tier as well from those that use ‘open-weight’ models to expensive monsters like Claude Fable. Models are Powerful tools at this level.
- 5k People (~0.00006%) have access to frontier-grade systems internally inside AI labs, they have the budget to put the frontier on automatic, spin up hundreds of agents, and burn their huge salary’s worth in tokens.
At these lower tiers of the funnel, they believe in the future the AI companies promise because they’ve literally bought in enough to actually get the experience.
How soon are we talking? Tons of people reject AI, and they continue making software.
I’m sure even in companies things are going to change, as it’s already not cheaper to make software with AI, not to mention the technical debt they’re building with nobody understanding the code largely produced by AI. Sure, as much as I want it, AI is probably not going to go away completely, but it’s going to swing back hard in the other direction.
The philosophy at my company has become “create technical debt, then declare technical bankruptcy and rewrite with severe breaking changes”.
not to mention the technical debt they’re building with nobody understanding the code largely produced by AI.
Swap AI with humans and this statement continues to be true.
You understand there is a difference though right?
Even if that statement is true is generality, it’s not like replacing a person, wholesale with an LLM, is a one for one exchange.
why can’t we syndicate them out, now, so your kids can actually program?
Why would I want my kids to code at this point? AI codes better already. This isn’t like John Henry and the steam engine. This is John Henry vs. a space ship.
Why? That’s an easy one. Money. AI does it “better” and faster, according to pointy hair bosses that don’t care they’ve given every employee a nuke without a safety. Love the downvotes. I am working in this biz right now. Believe or don’t believe it. It’s already coming and practically here. I have not written code in the last 12 months and I am evaluated on how much AI I have used. We are pruning people that are not using it or willing to learn how to use it. You won’t stop it. I won’t stop it and certainly the government is not going to stop it. We can rage all we want. This is here now. It’s not going anywhere.
AI has better test coverage. Less bugs and vulnerabilities. Way faster. especially when a company uses a proper AI Software Development Lifecycle. Not better than humans by a little. By factors. And is probably the scariest thing in my orbit right now. Every company adopting this is only concerned about beating their competitor. So all notion of safely is completely out the window.
Why would I want my kids to code at this point?
Because you want your children to learn the value and joy of creative expression? To learn the ability to solve problems – of any discipline, not just software – for themselves? To give them the ability to think critically and protect themselves in an increasingly hostile world? To feel the satisfaction and confidence boost of overcoming a difficult challenge?
I don’t know you, I don’t even know if you have kids or if this is just a rhetorical argument. But still, you don’t value any of your 30 years of experience enough to pass that knowledge on to a new generation? Because that’s what you’re telling us, and it doesn’t have anything to do with AI. That’s what we in the business call a You problem. You can feel defeated, that’s normal and I sympathize with it, but you can leave your capitulation at the door. Those kids deserve better.
Because you want your children to learn the value and joy of creative expression? To learn the ability to solve problems – of any discipline, not just software – for themselves? To give them the ability to think critically and protect themselves in an increasingly hostile world? To feel the satisfaction and confidence boost of overcoming a difficult challenge?
It is possible to do all of this without needing to teach any coding skills whatsoever. I’d even argue that, given the current state of affairs, teaching these important and valuable life lessons in a way that does not involve software would be the greater value.
There is a difference between the lesson and the medium. The point that is being made is that software development may not be the best choice as a medium to carry these kinds of lessons going forward. Would you, during the early hay days of the printing press, want to teach your children to take pride in themselves for their hard-won excellence in manual text transcription?
Well we’re already in agreement that programming is merely one medium, but with AI being used as a replacement for just about any form of human expression - audiovisual arts, writing, mathematics, information sciences, etc - all mediums are under the same looming threat. So if we’re giving up on one medium, we’re gonna be giving up on most of them. And without them, we can’t really pass on those lessons. Learning doesn’t exist in the abstract, we also have to put those lessons into practice. If OP wasn’t a programmer but a musician, let’s say, then I’d have the same admittedly harsh reaction. I don’t see any reason to doompost about the end of programming, or the end of music, or the end of learning.
Finally, I don’t really know where you’re going with the printing press analogy? Like, yes? I want children to take pride in themselves for any skill they practice and enjoy? But the printing press isn’t really analogous to AI, for a number of reasons:
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LLM’s, by their nature, produce an output that is of the same type as its inputs: text begets text, images beget images, etc. As such, you can make LLM’s generate their own instructions and feed that back into it. As we know from the Claude Code leaks, Anthropic was doing just that, using CC to ask C to work on CC.
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Printing presses did not create more… printing presses. They created more print. Not even more words, the press itself didn’t conjure Martin Luther’s 95 theses into existence, it just copied an existing text. Which makes it a useful addition to our ability to create, not an outright replacement.
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Printing presses were still human operated machines, requiring knowledge of its inner workings to maintain, repair, and operate. They’re not agentic, self-sustaining systems. Though you could argue that even AI is not self-sustaining, once its power grid fails. By the by, the printing press didn’t threaten global ecological catastrophe all on its own.
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Printing presses did not, in fact, extinguish the pencil. Schools do still teach kids how to write. Heck, humble brag time, even I get compliments on my penmanship from time to time, and I write in all capital letters!
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That sounds like why would I want my kids to learn math. Calculators do it better anyways.
Why would I want my kids to learn to write. LLMs do it faster anyways.
Reason schools teach the basics before letting students using the shortcuts is to first develop the foundations needed to know what is going on.
So even if they aren’t doing anything as machines do it they can still oversee what is going on if errors occur, which someone who doesn’t know anything at all wouldn’t be able to do. And if someome with no understanding without AI can do it then the human isn’t needed at all at that point.
The person you’re talking to has no critical thinking skills and is part of the reason everything is fucked up.
Given how many people fail learning from history, I can see why WasabiWabbit@lemmy.ca decided to betray his class. The foundations of class consciousness doesn’t exist. So we’ll continue repeating the poem of history.
Two questions for you:
- What behavior, if any, would you consider appropriate here?
- What have you done (other than posting hate-filled comments on Lemmy) to further your cause?
- Wabbit
- Are you claiming this is your project?
the human isn’t needed at all at that point.
Yes. This is the point they were making. On the current trajectory, and very soon to boot, many tasks — like writing code — will be entirely automated. That is exactly the goal of nearly every corporate player with any skin in this game, and for better or worse, it looks like this will indeed come to pass.
What value that leaves for human endeavor and understanding in these areas is an important but entirely separate matter.
We are pruning people that are not using it or willing to learn how to use it. You won’t stop it. I won’t stop it and certainly the government is not going to stop it.
Got it. So not only a treasonous class traitor, but also an accelerationist without an ounce morality and hope for a future.
Good luck in foodbanks.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/ai-companies-rushed-workers-fallout
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/shopify-ceo-ai-workplace-staff-horrified-backfire
While I definitely don’t disagree with you that our illustrious CEO’s and MBA executives are always looking to get rid of us blood filled cost accounts, it would seem that a lot of companies are finding out that AI isn’t the savior they thought it was.
In its current state, its much much worse than actual humans, and in the near future, will cost much much more as well.
Lol. Lmao even.
Thank you for being the adult in the room. I appreciate it even if others cannot.
It’s really disheartening to see people on here not only consistently fail to understand what is happening in the world around them, but also go on to tar and feather anyone who tries to give them an informed perspective.
Sir, this is a Wendys.
On one hand employers are telling their employees to use more AI, like their jobs depend on it and in the other hand an educational game dev program is punishing people for using it. I’m not pro-AI, but you’ve got to admit there are some mixed messages going on.
If you’re going to be a developer you will have to learn how to use AI. It’s as simple as that. Obviously there’s a big difference in AI assisted coding and asking Claude to make you a Mario clone.
You’re saying that as if the learning how to use AI with coding is the hard part and needs to be done from the start, rather than people learning the foundation that means you will understand not just what to tell the AI but what it is doing so you can think of the pitfalls it might not consider as well as have an idea of when something is taking longer than it should (or going much quicker than it should, which could mean it’s not really doing what you expected).
It’s a program for learning how to develop games. There’s no point in trying to teach someone who isn’t willing to learn. Businesses don’t give a shit about the wellbeing and continued professional development of their employees, they just want to see Line Go Up™. Therefore, they want employees to use the slop machine.
Those employers are just trying to get employees to code themselves out of a job. If AI is doing the work for you then there’s no sense in keeping you around, and no sense in teaching you anything.
I would’ve wanted to see exactly what kind of games these students were putting out.
QWOP
That’s unfair towards QWOP.
My two cents on this is that the education system is lagging.
Implied, thing’s are changing quickly too soon for any education to happen. A lot of education platforms are training companies llm modules. Students are adapting by using llms but it doesn’t produce more data. All big tech that’s invested in llms are pushing it harder down your throat to the point of canceling contracts as threats.
And then there’s always the “which studio will be shut down today?”
Better they don’t learn anything at all then the lazy ones pass, right?!
I think this is stupid. Ai use is a symptom and can be controlled. But it is helpful when learning to see more advanced work so you learn how it all comes together.
Edit: I think you’re missing the point: the kids who want to make a game and learn are punished by removing this, and the kids who want to slack off aren’t being hurt by cutting corners.
But are they learning anything other than “AI will do it for me”?
Are they learning anything when you take the fun exercise away from the motivated kids?
That’s more my issue.
If the other kids are using AI fix THAT. Don’t take away the fun projects.
You missed the point. No one was doing the “fun exercise”.
I can’t read the article because of adblock, was there truly not a single kid that submitted something not vibecoded?
I’d love to know and see the games myself. There was not a single kid mentioned in the article. It mentions “some kids” did it, but the article is speculation citing a reddit post, no one knows if AI was the reason for the programs shutdown from what I read.
That same person also suggested, however, that funding cutbacks could have been an even bigger factor in the decision, saying that “projects like this are the first to get cut” when government budgets get tight.
Feels like AI is engagement bait here 🪤
Well then give us the solution then to this problem of being able to easily differentiate student made projects and pure AI slop.
I’m sure the organizers and judges of this competition who literally started they cannot easily do so would love your answer.
Ask the student to explain how their program works in front of the class, with time for questions at the end.
They’ll still be able to start with vibe code, but they’ll be forced to actually think.
100% in a classroom setting but that’s not what this is. It’s not reasonable for the organizers of this national competition to be demanding source code, peer review it, understand it, and then asking the entrant to explain the code and how things work.
Keep running it, and let the ones who can learn learn? Although it was formatted as a competition, the main point of it was to assist learning, and that wouldn’t change for the kids who did put in the effort. If necessary, remove the competition part.
The main point of this was the competition, the fun was the competition for both the kids and the organizers/judges. Turning it into something else isn’t a solution to the problem the organizers were attempting to fix here since again the point and the fun here was the competition.
What’s the proposed solution for being able to easily differentiate student made projects and pure AI slop?
If I take a math course and everything is submitted from someone else solving it for me I’ll come off learning nothing.
And usually when it comes to advanced work it builds on the understanding of previous ones, so if you come off learning nothing from the one before then you hit a road block.
If you are able to do something with zero knowledge then it is something they don’t need you for, and you’ll probably lack the skills required for the advanced ones that do if you couldn’t even do the basics yourself.
As I posted on another comment:
Are they learning anything when you take the fun exercise away from the motivated kids?
That’s more my issue.
If the other kids are using AI fix THAT. Don’t take away the fun projects.
When learning something like derivatives my teacher made me do it the painful slow way of doing through graphing as opposed to using a formula. Afterwards we were allowed to use formulas and then later just our calculators.
Same thing applies to coding. AI bypasses learning fundamentals if the intent of the class is to teach the basics. If people run it through AI then there’s little reason for the class to exist and funds are better spend elsewhere.
Later on: “I can’t code or figure out code… how did this happen? I took courses and I chose the AI that passed them… why don’t I know the skills they were supposed to teach? “
No reason to look at all this and assume anyone learns anything.
What drives me nuts is that they’re still getting diplomas from good schools, so now interviews are a grueling multi-day gauntlet.
Stupid in, stupid out applies to teaching as well. 🥲
