Enhancing Student Learning and Creativity Through LLM-based PBL Semester Projects

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), there are becoming a larger part of people’s everyday lives – in their work, personal life or learning. Especially for programmers and software developers, learning how to best utilize LLMs as part of their work is becoming a crucial skill. This is especially important to students and educators have duty to prepare them to best tackle all obstacles and best utilize AI as a tool in their programming arsenal. Research into this normally focuses on the use of LLMs as tools for teaching and evaluation. This research takes another approach presenting the results from integrating LLMs as a central concept of project-based learning (PBL) semester projects for students from multiple grades from 5th semester bachelor’s to 10th semester masters. All projects develop interactive systems both traditional and virtual reality and encompass a wide variety of contexts that utilize AI as a central mechanic. We show the attitude of the participating students towards utilizing LLMs, their understanding before and after the projects of AI systems and their overall satisfaction with utilizing relatively new and open technology like LLMs. To our knowledge, this is one of the first such meta-analyses of long-term effects of utilizing LLMs in students’ work. We demonstrate the positive impact of utilizing LLMs on students’ motivation and learning and propose several best practices to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with using these tools.