Explicitly Introducing ChatGPT into First-year Programming Practice: Challenges and Impact

ChatGPT has recently emerged to aid in computer programming education due to its cutting-edge functionality of generating program code, debugging, etc. This research firstly focused on what the ethical considerations and solutions are for the first-year IT students who use ChatGPT to write computer programs in an integrated assignment. And then it turned to investigate what impact ChatGPT has on the programming competencies and learning outcomes of students compared to those who do not use ChatGPT. To ensure students use ChatGPT ethically, guidance was provided together with a declaration form of ethically using ChatGPT in each phase of the assignment. Next, we collected and analyzed a survey and their declaration from students and compared student effort, time spent, and performance outcomes from those who were using and without using ChatGPT. Based on the findings, we concluded that although ChatGPT provides an opportunity to the first-year students to learn programming in the way of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, many students still prefer the conventional way of learning programming in terms of comprehension and application. We argued that since our students in the programming course are always from different academic background levels, we would continue to use both ChatGPT and conventional eLearning resources to meet different learning requirements.