ASU students and faculty co-design custom GPT

Students enrolled in ASU 121: Creative Solutions in Action are working to tackle some of the biggest challenges on the ASU campus and in the Phoenix community. They are also learning to use custom AI tools to enhance their creativity and problem-solving skills.

Alison Lester, an assistant teaching professor with University College, teaches the course. “How AI folds into it is thinking about cocollaborating with it,” Lester said “How could it be a partner in designing solutions for community needs? That’s something I’m exploring with students”.

For the first half of the spring 2025 semester, she has worked alongside her students to cocreate a customized AI experience inside ChatGPT. The goal is to create a new tool that helps students work through new ideas and role-play scenarios that include preparing for meetings, brainstorming ideas and working out logistics to solve real community problems.

The GPT is set up with instructions to direct the AI on engagement These include: Be a coach, not a fixer Keep the responses short with questions to encourage engagement.

The custom GPT is also preloaded with the course syllabus, activities, and assignments. Four starting prompts can be updated as students move through the course, such as, “Do you need help roleplaying as a stakeholder?” The bot is also set up with Lester’s teaching style, sense of humor, and playfulness.

“As a teacher, this is where we can be vulnerable and dive into a co-learning process alongside our students,” Lester said “It's so rich for me to sit back and understand how to foster ethical AI, responsible AI, and doing that with learners kind of helps us twofold: understand how to use it, but also get a sense of their critical thinking that's happening with it.”

For both students and professor, cocreating and co-developing ChatGPT AI bot has brought a richer sense of community and creativity. “Part of the journey and fun is that students have an equal voice in creating this,” Lester said.

Written by Joycelyn Munoz.