See how other students are using GenAI
Students at Federation are finding their own creative and responsible ways of using GenAI in their studies. Here are some examples from our Peer Learning Mentors.
There are many ways to use GenAI to responsibly support your learning, but remember that it’s not always allowed. Make sure you know the rules for all your units, as they may be different.
Student prompts in action
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Explain/clarify concepts | Act as an expert on anatomy and physiology. Explain to me in simple terms what it means for the diaphragm to be a flow generator. |
Initial prompt was good quality for what I needed. Additional interactions used to deepen knowledge and ask clarifying questions for my own understanding. Output from CoPilot was good, but would still need to be cautious that it may be inaccurate. |
Yes - good for simple explanations of concepts to help clarify study materials. May not be completely accurate though, so students will need to be cautious. |
| To help with a practical lab component | My cells are in a floating in a T-75 flask and I need to change the media; how do I do this without aspirating the cells? | Good quality output after several detailed inputs, could definitely be better. Input requires multiple definitions. | Good for understanding and further exploration if one already has some basic knowledge about the topic. |
| Learn English vocabulary | You are an expert educator and reading specialist, with specific expertise in teaching vocabulary acquisition and application. Your role is to provide information about the new word “temperament” in the table below (the screenshots). Please explain the definition in simple English so that a person with an IELTS score of 6.5, can easily understand it. After the definition, give me one or two example sentences in English. In the same column, please also translate these sentences into Vietnamese in a natural and authentic way. |
My prompt was effective as it clearly set the role for Copilot, my background, explained the structure I needed. However, it will be better if I follow a structure to make the prompt shorter, clearer and less repetitive. The tool's output was strong overall. It followed the table format, providing explanations and translations quickly. |
The tool is useful because it saves significant time, I don’t need to manually input or look up new words in a dictionary. However, when I asked it to generate more than 20 words at once, it only produced 11. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Turn written content into an infographic | Can you please create an infographic summary of all the important information in this document? Include: the task outlined, the suggested methods, and the purpose behind the project. | I didn't specify the infographic style, so it created categories with subheadings and dotpoints with emojis next to each subheading, so if I wanted a more specific visual aesthetic I could have been clearer. Visuals aside, the prompt provided a perfect and accurate output from the tool. |
Yes! Summarised all the important aspects of my document into dot points which made it much clearer and easier to understand. Could be great to help students understand particularly wordy documents and understand its key aspects swiftly. |
| To make a comparison between two subjects and make it into a chart | Analyse the functions, similarity and difference of Centre Information Point and Family Violence Information Share Scheme, make it into a table chart. | Good quality output after clarification for the specific requirement. |
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| Summarise textbooks / articles |
Read textbooks, articles in the attached file:
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My prompt focused on the expected outputs (summarise based only on the textbook). The output from Copilot was very useful; I could get a comprehensive understanding of this article without any effort. However, it only provided general information and surface-level detail -> need to revisit the text to add depth and fully understand it. |
This is a good use of GenAI as it provided a well-strucuted, time-saving summary. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Create a mnemonic | Help me create a mnemonic for the nerves of the leg. | Prompt quality could be improved, but the output was quite good for the level of detail I required. Might need more input if I wanted a more detailed or specific output. | Good use for inspiration. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Structure timing for an presentation | I have an assessment that is a 7 minute presentation; it is presenting my research topic and giving introduction, background, rational, analysis of literature and then how the project is designed. Can you help me structure the timing of this assessment and approximately how many words for the time. | Worked well at giving me structure for something I go over time with often. | I feel this is a good use as I am building myself parameters to work within without it doing the work. |
| Practice oral exam questions | Ask me 5 viva questions about the respiratory system and give feedback on my answers. | My prompt needed more structure. Once I asked it to wait for my answers, it became way more realistic. | Yes — it’s like having a personal examiner for practice. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Create a PowerPoint slide background for an assignment presentation | Can you help me make a PowerPoint slide background? It's for a university assignment presentation. I'd like a clean and classic background. It is based in Education, but I don't want it to be overtly 'school' themed. | I didn't give a detailed enough prompt so I probably could have got more out of it if I had been more specific with my request. | This wasn't a useful task as I could have just used a standard template from PowerPoint and had a more interesting layout/background. I would need a much more detailed prompt to get something better in which time I could probably just create something myself. |
| Create a website | Create me a basic website using Angular with a home and 4 other menu items. Use colours blue and gold. | What I wanted is a basic website skeleton and ChatGPT surpassed my expectations with its output. | Clearly an excellent usage. |
| Converting exam timetable into a more readable format |
Summarise the following information into a table with the following headings: unit, exam, time (start and end, including reading time), if it is an exact time or is still TBC, location. (copy paste exam timetable) |
Very good quality prompt - I think specifying the headings I wanted in my table was important to the success. This led to a good output. | Great use! Made my exam timetable a lot easier to read. Also helpful in distributing it to employers or anyone else who needs to know my availability. |
| Converting exam timetable into calendar invites |
(following on from above) Could you create blocks for my Outlook calendar? |
Very good quality! As with everything, it is worth double checking the output to make sure it is accurate. | Great use! Saved me a lot of time, trying to decode my exam timetable and input it manually into my calendar. |
| Make a lesson plan based on rhyming words |
Make a year 1 rhyming lesson plan based on 'Cat in the Hat' by Dr Seuss. |
The prompt was basic, so more specific instructions (time, materials, specific content) would likely make a more quality output. | Good starting point to base a lesson around. If familiar with lesson content and one already has ideas, it might take just as much time tweaking and carefully reading over the generated lesson plan as it does to make one from scratch - but is good for idea generation and to generate starting points for less familiar topics or activities. |
| Make a worksheet on the above lesson |
Yes. (In response to GenAI: Would you like a printable worksheet or visual aids to go with this plan?) |
Would need to tweak the prompt significantly. | Not really - editing the initially generated worksheet would take almost the same time as writing from scratch. Prompting for a new revised worksheet would take some trial and error that probably would take longer than just making one yourself. Best utilised as an example to get ideas flowing. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| Emotional support | I feel like I'm failing. What can I do? | It validated my feelings and provided emotional support, provided a step-by-step breakdown of small goals I can achieve, and suggested FedUni's counselling services. | |
| To find some meals for the week | What are 3 high protein meals (above 40grams), no egg or fish. | Initial prompt was fine; I could have added a bit more detail. Output was also fine. | I think it was ok, it took a while to respond and wasn't greatly flexible, I had to be very specific. |
| To find a study playlist | Can you provide me a playlist of songs which are high energy for studying that don’t have words. | Quality of my prompt was ok, could have been slightly more detailed. The quality of output from AI was very good. Although it failed to convert it into a Spotify playlist it provided clear instructions on how to do so. | I think it was a good use of AI, of course it’s part of the fun to listen to your own music and select which songs you want in a playlist this was convenient and time saving. |
| To plan a short trip | Can you create a 3 day itinerary for Ballarat, Australia? Include food and things to do. | I think the quality of my prompt was good, it specified what I wanted. | Yes, it saves time. |
| Purpose | Prompt | Reflection | Useful or not |
| To create a CV template | Can you provide examples of CVs for a provisional psychologist role? | My initial prompt could have been more specific in directly requesting the template. The second response was much improved and made good use of the existing knowledge about me. | Yes, it was helpful. It saved me time by eliminating the need to search through multiple websites. |
| Draft an email to a lecturer | Can you please help me write an email to let my lecturer know I cannot attend class tomorrow? | Prompt was sufficient and output was good. | Yes, this is a good use of AI. It helps to be clear and offer enough information without saying too much. It ensures the email is professional and could help students who struggle with online communication. |