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Can Chat GPT Speed Up The Learning Process For Students?   

One use case I have found ChatGPT is quite helpful for a student because it could replace a teacher when a student is at home doing homework or studying.  Why?  At home, a student could not get help from a teacher like a student could get help in a school.  This is why I think AI (Artificial Intelligence) like Chat GPT is quite useful in this way!  Personally, although I'm not a student, I often self-learn programming languages such as Javascript and whatnot, and I often found that I have to use Google to look for documentation for a long read on a subject that I need to have clarity on.  Sometimes, this could be very tedious.  Before Chat GPT was available, I would often wish a teacher would be there to give me clarity.  Now, I often reach for Chat GPT to get clarity on something that I urgently need to get clarity on - without the part of having to laboriously read long documentation that is often hard to understand.

A good example of why a student may need Chat GPT is let's assume that a computer science student is at home trying to understand what is a constructor of a class, but this student doesn't have a teacher around.  No problem!  Chat GPT comes to the rescue.  Let's ask Chat GPT what is a constructor, OK?

A student asks:

In Python, there is no constructor keyword like new. Why Javascript uses new as keyword for constructor? Is it really that necessary?

Chat GPT answers:

In JavaScript, the new keyword is used to create an instance of an object that is created using a constructor function. When you use the new keyword, it does the following:

  1. Creates a new, empty object.
  2. Sets the value of this to be the new object.
  3. Calls the constructor function with the this value set to the new object.
  4. If the constructor function doesn't return a value, the new operator implicitly returns the new object.

The new keyword is not strictly necessary in JavaScript, but it is a convenient way to create an object and call a constructor function at the same time. You can also use the constructor function directly without the new keyword, but in that case, you will need to create the object yourself and call the constructor function using the object as the this value.

In Python, you don't need to use a new keyword or a constructor function to create an object. Instead, you can just create an object using the class name, like this:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self.value = 0

obj = MyClass()

Here, the __init__ method serves as a constructor function in Python, and it is called automatically when you create an object using the MyClass class.

I think the answer that Chat GPT gave is quite good.  If I were this student, I certainly understood that Chat GPT suggested that a constructor would be called upon to prepare and assign attributes to an object that you would want to create (instantiate) from a class.  This is object-oriented stuff of course!  This is why at the end, Chat GPT mentioned that function __init__ inside MyClass is how Python would look for first to see what it could assign to an object before actually creating this object, and in this case, is MyClass object.

In summary, AI like Chat GPT will be really useful for so many students and people who like to self-learn.  I think it's a great technology we should embrace.  Just like any other tool, this Chat GPT could be used for all sorts of purposes.  A hacker could use it to speed up his hacking, but a student could also use it to speed up a learning process.  It's up to the user!

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Famous quote by:   
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

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