A. About Myself

I think I learned best in this course through two main things. First, group activities and the discussions we did after them, because we all shared our opinions and it was fun, so any information sticked. The activity that stood out the most to me was the one we did about how we view AI and whether we would give it names. We gave it interesting names like washing machine because it fixes grammar mistakes and any errors in typing, so it “cleans it.” Someone also named it a chocolate box, which I found interesting because we are not sure which chocolate we will get we can get a bad one and we are also unsure about what AI gives us, as it can provide inaccurate information.

This way of learning was a new experience for me. I am more used to traditional learning from slides, so I think this approach was a good change that boosted my way of thinking and made it easier for me to learn.

B. Academic Life

For my academic life, I feel that researching and writing reflections really improved my academic skills. I am used to writing research without reflection or reflection without research and while doing both was exhausting, I think it helped me understand and remember what I did better. I think having the ability to write my opinion and what I learned forces me to actually understand and remember what I am doing.

My favorite assignment that involved this was AI in Your Fieldhttps://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/ai-in-your-field/. I loved the topic since it is personalized depending on our major, so it makes us actually curious to know the information. Doing the research and the interview felt easier because of all the work we did during the rest of the semester that also required research and reflections, like the Comparing AI Tools assignment. These assignments really improved my critical thinking and my ability to reflect my opinion. I think both aspects reflecting and researching are especially important for me as a psychology student, since most of our assignments will require either this or that.

C. Social Life

My social skills are good in general, but I am usually quiet in classes because there are not many opportunities to work in groups and I used to be a bit insecure to share my ideas. So having all these group works and discussions, even the Soliya experience, enhanced my skills to talk in groups when it is class-related too. I see the difference between my first session in Soliya and the last one, where I am much more interactive and more comfortable sharing my opinions. So I am more confident now in participating in debates and class discussions than before.

D. Career

I learned a lot about AI, which tools are better than others and that tools are used for different purposes some only for chat, some for finding articles and some for helping you write. AI is now under many subpoints for me and even after the last assignment AI in Your Field, I think I know better now how I will use it as a therapist to save my time by organizing my notes while not affecting my clients.

Three things I created in this course that I would show someone:

1.     If I were to show someone my learning in this course the first thing I would show is my Alt CV. https://www.canva.com/design/DAGzjO9AHnc/qF1Wy_DwO3Acw5JraTo3XQ/edit?utm_content=DAGzjO9AHnc&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebuttonI really liked this assignment because it allowed us to be creative and include images and it was a good reflection about our own selves. We do not usually get the chance to describe who we are in such a creative way. So doing this assighment made me use my creativity and self awareness. I also liked that we shared it with students from different countries and got to see their Alt CVs as well.

2.     The second thing I would show is the gamehttps://sensational-blini-1dbe3c.netlify.app/  that me and Farah created. Not only because I loved how it turned out, but also because at the beginning of the semester I thought it was going to be very hard and nearly impossible. It looked difficult and involved coding and I had no experience with something like that before. However, as the semester went on and as we tried many games, it became much clearer. In the end, we did it better than I expected. I gained the ability to actually create a narrative game and I think this would be helpful as a creative idea for future projects in different courses.

3.     The third assignment that I would show is personally my favorite, which is the games reflections.https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/games-reflection-1/  I remember that I spent so much time working on it and it was very interesting to me. In this assignment, we had to play many games and write specific reflections on them. This assignment was informative in two ways. First, the games included information to learn from according to the topics. Second, it helped me understand more what a narrative game is and how to create it in multiple ways.

If I could change 2–3 things about the course, I would make the Soliya experience optional with bonus points or as make-up classes. I believe Soliya consumed my time attending and my effort participating and it was all in addition to the work and assignments we have in our class, which at a certain point was overwhelming. I am not saying to remove Soliya because it was still beneficial, so I suggest maybe leaving it but in a way that can compensate students.

I also think there was a lot of major assighments we did so I thought it would be better if we only focused on 3 for example and we could’ve done the rest in group work in class or even in a presentation.

In one sentence: What kind of person should take this course?

I think someone who actually wants to learn something, likes to be creative and is willing to put in the effort.

Tools I liked and disliked:

As for the tools, I really liked Gemini Canvas. I didn’t know about it before and that it could actually code for us and help us create a game. It was really beneficial and a time saver. I would definitely use it in the future in any course that requires something creative like that or even for personal use for fun. Another tool was Gemini Deep Search. It is really good at finding peer-reviewed articles and I would use it in my future research. Something we all know but I rarely use, which is Google Scholar, I didn’t know how useful it was until a recent activity we did for fact checking. We kept searching for the main source of the news everywhere but couldn’t find it until Youssef found it in Google Scholar. So it really helps with sources that we can’t find normally. Two more tools but in class that were really helpful were the boards and chairs. They were both very convenient. We were able to sit comfortably in a circle and move smoothly. Also, the boards were everywhere and were very useful in activities where every group went to a different board and wrote on it. I hope all classes become like that. I can’t think of a tool that I specially dislike maybe the blogpost website because everyone can see my work so there is no much privacy but I still think it was for a purpose for all of us to learn.

GCC experience:

For the GCC, I think it was a good experience but I only liked the first Zoom meeting. It was informative and we were able to communicate with them. Getting to privately talk to them and sharing our opinion was a good experience and was similar to soliya. However,  I don’t think the group chat idea on Slack really worked. We didn’t really talk, we were just submitting the assignments on it but we didn’t communicate. I think it would have been better if we did another Zoom meeting only with our group instead of these assignments in the group chat.