Listeners will gain valuable strategies for employing Lightning Talks as a pedagogical tool, with emphasis on their simplicity, the encouragement of critical thinking, and the promotion of a more inclusive and engaging learning environment. The episode is rich with anecdotes and experiences, highlighting how these brief, impromptu presentations can ease the anxiety associated with public speaking, inspire creativity, and facilitate a deeper connection with subject matter. Furthermore, the conversation also touches on the adaptability of Lightning Talks across different educational contexts, offering listeners a comprehensive view on integrating this format into their teaching repertoire to ignite enthusiasm and foster a vibrant learning culture.

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This week, Kelly and Sean caught up with Josh to learn about his educational journey since we last spoke with him, the latest developments on EduBlocks, as well as the new direction enabled by Anaconda's purchase of EduBlocks in May 2023.

Special Guest: Josh Lowe.

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Links:

• Edublocks — EduBlocks is a free tool by Anaconda that helps anyone learn how to code with text-based languages like Python or HTML using a familiar drag-and-drop blocks system
• Anaconda
• Anaconda Press Release Announcing Purchase of EduBlocks — Anaconda Inc., provider of the world’s most popular data science platform, today announced the acquisition of EduBlocks, a free, web-based, drag-and-drop coding platform built to help K-12 students learn fundamental skills. With EduBlocks, Anaconda expands its reach and offerings for K-12 schools as well as for beginner-level professionals.

In this episode of the Teaching Python podcast, Kelly and Sean delve into the topic of ChatGPT and its potential impact on computer science education. ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI that has generated a lot of buzz in the tech industry. The hosts consider both the potential benefits and drawbacks of using ChatGPT in the classroom, and discuss how it could be used to enhance the learning experience.

One of the key points they address is the question of whether ChatGPT will be a helpful or harmful addition to computer science education. On the one hand, ChatGPT has the potential to be a powerful teaching aid, providing students with a unique and engaging way to learn. On the other hand, there are concerns that the use of ChatGPT could lead to a reduction in critical thinking skills, as students may rely too heavily on the tool for solutions.

Ultimately, Kelly and Sean argue that ChatGPT has the potential to be a valuable resource for educators, but it is important to use it in a balanced and mindful way. They suggest that incorporating ChatGPT into the curriculum in combination with other teaching methods could be an effective way to maximize its benefits and minimize any negative effects. If you are interested in learning more about ChatGPT and its potential applications in education, be sure to check out the linked resources.

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Links:

• ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue — We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.
• Aligning Language Models to Follow Instructions — We’ve trained language models that are much better at following user intentions than GPT-3 while also making them more truthful and less toxic, using techniques developed through our alignment research. These InstructGPT models, which are trained with humans in the loop, are now deployed as the default language models on our API.
• Proximal Policy Optimization — We’re releasing a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which perform comparably or better than state-of-the-art approaches while being much simpler to implement and tune. PPO has become the default reinforcement learning algorithm at OpenAI because of its ease of use and good performance.
• ChatGPT Equivalent Is Open-Source, But it Is of No Use to Developers — It seems like the first open-source ChatGPT equivalent has emerged. It is an application of RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) built on top of Google’s PaLM architecture, which has 540 billion parameters. PaLM + RLHF, ChatGPT Equivalent is open-source now, it is a text-generating model that acts similarly to ChatGPT, was provided by the developer in charge of reverse engineering closed-sourced AI systems like Meta’s Make-A-Video. It is characterized as a work in progress.
• How AI Is Changing The Way Students Learn — In the education landscape, technology is rapidly changing. AI and machine learning, in particular, are now impacting the education sector in numerous ways. In fact, despite some commonly held beliefs, the use of AI in education goes beyond grading student assessments, and this technology can greatly benefit both educators and students.
• Brian Bourque on Twitter: — "ChatGPT will revolutionize how non-technical folks build products. Here's an example (I put this together in 2 min, so yeah, it's crappy):" / Twitter
• Can Anti-Plagiarism Tools Detect When AI Chatbots Write Student Essays? | EdSurge News — After its launch last month, ChatGPT, the latest chatbot released by OpenAI, made the rounds online. Alex, a sophomore at a university in Pittsburgh, started toying with the chatbot about a week after it was released, after finding out about it on Twitter. Within a couple of days, he got really excited by the quality of the writing it produced. The chatbot was good, he says—really good. (“Alex” is the name that this person provided to EdSurge. He only agreed to speak anonymously, for fear of repercussions for admitting to academic dishonesty.)
• Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic — Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.
• ChatGPT for Google - Chrome Web Store — Display ChatGPT response alongside Google Search results This is an open-source extension that show response from ChatGPT alongside Google and other search engines
• ZohaibAhmed/chatgpt-api: This repo is unofficial ChatGPT api. It is based on Daniel Gross's WhatsApp GPT — It uses playwright and chromium to open browser and parse html. It is an unoffical api for development purpose only.
• lencx/ChatGPT: 🔮 ChatGPT Desktop Application (Mac, Windows and Linux) — This is a major and exciting update. It works like a Telegram bot command and helps you quickly populate custom models to make chatgpt work the way you want it to. This project has taken a lot of my spare time, so if it helps you, please help spread the word or star it would be a great encouragement to me. I hope I can keep updating it and adding more interesting features.
• ChatGPT Tutorial - A Crash Course on Chat GPT for Beginners - YouTube — This ChatGPT Tutorial is a Crash Course on Chat GPT for Beginners. With the increase in popularity, ChatGPT is still unknown to many people. In this video, I will provide a crash course on different ways to use ChatGPT.