Scenario-Based Design with ChatGPT: A First-Year Seminar Experience

A first-year seminar for university students has the goal of orienting new students to resources and opportunities of the campus. Ideally, students emerge from a first-year seminar feeling more comfortable, more situated, and more prepared to participate and succeed. In my 2023 first-year seminar classes, I incorporated a couple two approachable but significant content ideas from information sciences and technology, namely, the scenario-based design method and the ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool. I leveraged these ideas both in presenting various seminar topics and in shaping a mini-course project for the students. I hoped that this would help raise questions about concepts and methods throughout the seminar, thus making it a bit more like an academic seminar, and that the mini-course project would allow the students to experience group work, a commonly used teaching method in information sciences and technology.