The advent of artificial intelligence has brought about a paradigm shift across numerous sectors, including education. Technologies such as ChatGPT by OpenAI hold the power to impact modern education. This study begins by exploring how AI-powered systems could provide opportunities for personalised learning within education, but after applying design thinking research methodologies, a problem statement was devised focusing on how AI-powered environments could promote critical thinking.

This project began with an exploration of the research question: how AI-powered systems could provide opportunities for personalised learning within education. After conducting some initial research, this was refined to how can AI-powered environments be used to promote critical thinking in education.

I chose design thinking and experimental methods to explore the problem area because they allowed for:

• Divergent and convergent thinking
• A hyper-focusing on the users
• A means to empirically test any solutions

These methods demonstrated….illuminated….and enabled me to conclude on…..

• Design Thinking (Primary Method): This qualitative method involves a human-centered approach to designing solutions focusing on understand people's needs, motivations, and behaviours. This method emphasises comprehending human needs, redefining issues in a human-focused manner, brainstorming concepts, and creating prototypes for testing. The study utilises various design thinking methods to explore and integrate insights through convergence and divergence processes.
• Experimental Methods (Secondary Method): This quantitative method was intended to provide empirical evidence on the effectiveness of solutions through controlled experiments. The plan was to measure the impact of each solution on learning outcomes and provide quantifiable data to support findings. However, due to time limitations, this experiment was not conducted, but instead designed as a proposal.

The journey combined qualitative and quantitative approaches, emphasising user-centered design and empirical validation, even though the latter could not be fully implemented within the project's timeframe.

It involved multiple stages, reflecting the steps in the Design Thinking process:

• Stage 1: Conducting interviews and secondary research to understand the needs and motivations of the stakeholders (students and educators)
• Stage 2: Involved three processes:
  • Analysing the key themes, behaviours, and pain points from the research that was gathered
  • Generating user profiles that represented the stakeholders.
  • Defining a problem statement using the theory of change method.
• Stage 3: Exploring existing solutions in the market, understanding underserved areas, and developing initial product strategies.
• Stage 4: Creating a small-scale, minimum-viable product by through wireframing and rapid prototyping using tools like Figma.
• Stage 5 (Planned): Designing an experiment to test hypotheses related to the project, involving a treatment and control group.

The outcome of this project was a high-fidelity mockup, created on Figma, that was designed to represent a minimum viable product of an environment that promoted critical thinking.

The design was influenced by a collection of education apps such as Grammarly and Notion to bring a sense of familiarity to the designs.

The app aimed to analyse student work and prompt them with suggestions (powered by AI) to think more critically. Each time a student improved on a suggestion, this would be saved in a chain of modifications that could be exported as an artefact (that could possibly be shared alongside their submission) to showcase that the student had, in fact, thought critically about their piece of work and showcases development over time.