Assignment Title
| Using AI to Design and Verify Structural Components |
| Delivery Format | In-person |
| Learning Objectives | - Apply the LRFD design method to size a steel girder and a reinforced concrete girder under specific conditions.
- Develop effective prompts to get useful design assistance from an AI tool.
- Critically evaluate AI-generated engineering outputs, know its limitations, and reflect on its proper use in design practice.
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| Brief Summary of Assignment | In this structural design homework, students first hand-solve 1) steel and 2) reinforced-concrete girder designs given conditions and limits, using AI only for general conceptual questions. They then revise their answers using AI (primarily Gemini, with free campus access; any LLM is permitted) with no restrictions, marking all AI-driven changes as tracked changes in a different color. Finally, students critique a baseline “whole-problem” AI solution, identifying logical, arithmetic, or assumption errors. A prompt library and a reflection survey are included. |
| Guardrails Shared with Students | - For sub-questions (a)–(c), students may only ask AI general conceptual questions (not questions about the specific problem).
- For sub-question (d), AI use is unrestricted, but all AI-driven revisions must be shown as tracked changes in a distinct color, so the AI’s contribution is clearly attributable.
- Students must first solve the problem by hand, and then verify AI-reported outputs against their own solution.
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| Feedback & Impact | The majority of students said that the use of AI was helpful, gave them more confidence in their solutions, and provided the opportunity to think more deeply about the assignment problems. Even with this generally positive feedback, a few students responded that they either relied heavily on AI to solve the problem or trusted AI's engineering design too much. |
| Assignment Details | |
