Enhancing mathematics education through AI Chatbots in a Flipped Learning Environment

Current work reports the implementation of a flipped learning activity with the assistance of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot to provide insights into how AI can be used to enhance learning outcomes. AI chatbots have the potential to revolutionize education, including engineering education; however, their accelerated development has raised concern among the academic community, leading in some cases to restrict their use. This reaction often stems from the perception that AI chatbots could threaten the current educational paradigm or undermine academic integrity and learning outcomes. Through action research, we explored how the use of Bing Chat could enhance a flipped learning collaborative activity within a Mathematics for Decision-making course. The activity was implemented with 32 students in a private Mexican institution who solved a task for verifying the completion of the home assignment and fostering the discussion inside the classroom. Our data consisted of these solutions, as well as an individual reflection on the usefulness of Bing Chat and its effectiveness in aiding the completion of the task. We conducted a quantitative analysis, through the descriptive statistics of the grades obtained in such task, and a qualitative analysis, through the text mining of the individual reflections. Part of the analysis focused on determining whether interacting with the chatbot encouraged students' development of critical thinking skills by using, analyzing, and evaluating the chatbot's and their own performance. This research is particularly relevant to STEM education, where technological proficiency is a key skill and an AI chatbot can potentially enhance students' autonomous and active learning, as well as foster the development of their critical thinking skills.