Charting the Future of AI in Project-Based Learning: A Co-Design Exploration with Students

Students’ increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents new challenges for assessing their mastery of knowledge and skills in project-based learning (PBL). This paper introduces a co-design study to explore the potential of students’ AI usage data as a novel material for PBL assessment. We conducted workshops with 18 college students, encouraging them to speculate an alternative world where they could freely employ AI in PBL while needing to report this process to assess their skills and contributions. Our workshops yielded various scenarios of students’ use of AI in PBL and ways of analyzing such usage grounded by students’ vision of how educational goals may transform. We also found that students with different attitudes toward AI exhibited distinct preferences in how to analyze and understand their use of AI. Based on these findings, we discuss future research opportunities on student-AI interactions and understanding AI-enhanced learning.