Using an AI agent to formulate the task for a school informatics project

The article discusses the possibility of using an AI agent at the initial stage of a student’s work on a school informatics project in extracurricular activities. The relevance of the proposed approach is connected with the fact that students often begin a project with a general idea of a future program but have difficulties turning this idea into a clearly formulated task suitable for further programming. The article describes a model of an AI agent that does not write code instead of the student, but asks clarifying questions and helps define the project goal, the first working version of the program, main functions, user actions, program responses, interface, input and output data, limitations, and criteria for checking the result. It is shown that this organization of work makes the initial stage of project activity more conscious and supports the development of individual components of computational thinking: decomposition, abstraction, algorithmic thinking, data formalization, testing, and iterative refinement of the solution. The material may be useful for informatics teachers organizing extracurricular and supplementary activities related to the development of school projects using generative artificial intelligence.