AI used in our project

Hello again! Time to catch you up on where I am now with my CS capstone course. We have been given our team project assignment and my group, myself and two other students, are working on a cross-platform personal trainer app. This was my second-choice project, but I am very passionate about fitness and enjoy working out and staying active so it’s a great fit for me. We have made good process so far with a basic layout of our mobile app set up with each route that links all of our screens and we are using Kotlin and Android Studio. I’ve never used Android Studio or Kotlin previously, so I have enjoyed getting the know the new tools while also feeling a little bit anxious about it. Thankfully, one of my group members has prior experience with both Kotlin and Android studio so he’s a great resource.

The prompt we were given this week was about how we are using AI in our project, the pros and cons, and if we think it has made us a better programmer. While we are not using AI directly in our app, we have used it to help generate a list of workouts to include in our app. Since our app will generate workouts for the user to complete, we needed a large list of exercises for it to select from including cardio, strength training, and calisthenics. We could think of some exercises on our own and research some, but ChatGPT was utilized to help generate this list. Our group decided that this would be the best course of action as it would save us a lot of time and since this is a crucial part of our app it needed to be completed ASAP, but something that would be a lot for one person to completed so the power of ChatGPT was utilized. Some of the pros are that it saved our group a lot of time, is easy to use, gives detailed answers, and overall, it gives very accurate answers as well. In fact, it helped our group come up with 169 total exercises to be integrated into our fitness app. Some of the cons are that you have word your questions/prompts in a certain fashion to get the desired answers, but I feel as though the more you use it the better you get at learning to phrase things in a way that it will give you the output you desire. I’ve not used it to write code so I cannot speak if it directly makes me a better programmer, but I can say that with the time it saved our group it has allowed us to focus on programming our app so in that regard yes, the time saved has allowed me to focus on learning Kotlin which is helping me to become a better programmer by learning a new language. Chat soon,

– Ashleigh