David Malan

that they're using every day or every week, certainly throughout CS50.

So among the goals pedagogically is to help them understand how do the tools work that you yourself have been using.

Two, to help them understand what is it that the world is talking about nowadays.

And three, prepare them to use these tools more effectively by the end of the semester, because for instance, for CS50's final project,

Students are encouraged and welcome to use Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or any number of off-the-shelf AI tools, though we don't allow those through policy for the course's assignments.

Yeah, so this virtual rubber duck at CS50.ai, which anyone with a free GitHub account can use, is really meant by design to be a less helpful version of ChatGPT, one that is also more attuned to CS50's own material and syllabus and so forth.

And that's because all of these tools off the shelf can pretty much do your homework

And this has been true for several years, even before the fall of 2022 when ChatGPT came out.

I mean, we were looking closely at GitHub Copilot for some time because if you created an empty text file in VS Code called mario.c, which is the file name we use for one of CS50's problem sets, and if you so much as type, I think, hash and then i for include, you pretty much get a suggestion to autocomplete the entirety of that particular problem set.

And that's just because, I mean, we, for better or for worse, are part of these models insofar as the open courseware has presumably been slurped up as with the rest of the internet as part of the training data, so to speak, for these AI models.

So that is both good and bad.

And that's why we set out to make our own sort of duck-themed version of these tools that puts downward pressure on that willingness of the tools to be too helpful.

And we've tried to attune the duck to be more akin to a good teacher or tutor rather

leads you to the solution, but certainly doesn't auto-complete your whole way through it.

Pretty much.

And it's much easier to do this now than it was in 2022 and 2023 when we first rolled this out, which is to say there's a lot of tools, even commercial tools that faculty can use to do the same kind of thing for their own course.

For us, it was important to draw a clean line in the sands of students because you could approximate this duck by just telling students, hey, everyone, go copy-paste this system prompt, as you described, into ChatGPT before you ask your homework question.

And no one's going to do that.

And it's going to drift out of date.

And it just feels too clunky.