I am always faced with a difficult challenge at the end of the year: What to do with my AP Gov students after they have finished the AP test? Because the Gov exam is always first, there are more than a few days of classes that need to be filled meaningfully.

To solve this problem, I have created a variety of post-AP projects. I decided this year that one of the options would include explicit use of AI, in order to give students the opportunity to play with, and reflect on, the capabilities of AI. 

The project required students to write a new constitution for their ideal form of government. The first step was simply to determine the structure of their government by answering a series of questions in a graphic organizer (Federal or unitary government? How many branches? Unicameral or bicameral legislature and length of terms?)

Once they knew what their government would look like, they were instructed to write prompts for Chat GPT, using the AI’s responses to piece together a constitution. They were required to save the prompts they used, so that after they assembled their new constitution they could highlight the document and explain what prompt they used to generate each section.

The final step asked them to reflect on the process of creating their constitution using Chat GPT. They were asked to describe any challenges or surprises when working with the AI.

Truth be told, I didn’t get great reflections from the seniors. They were reflecting in the final days of their high school career. BUT, I would like to play around with this type of assignment again. The value, I think, is in asking students to examine critically what AI is producing when given a particular prompt, so they can see both the value and pitfalls in using generative AI to produce text. Next time, I may model what this process would look like, so that they can understand what type of reflecting I want them to do.