To develop this week's activity, I created an educational chatbot, but I wanted to do it differently: the questions were answered by the character of Professor Dumbledore. The idea was for him to converse with the UEI community about STEAM, educational software, and criteria for choosing these technologies, but always grounded in research sources. It was really fun to do because it wasn't just about creating a bot and that's it. I needed to test the questions several times, notice where the answers were generic, adjust the prompt, go back to the texts, improve the guidance, and try to bring the answers closer to what the authors discussed.
It was precisely in this process that I managed to relate the activity to the professor's post about Flow Theory. Creating the chatbot required a balance between challenge and skill, because if the activity was just "using an AI tool," it might have become boring, as it would only be experimenting with something new without much depth. But, at the same time, if the requirement was to create a fully grounded chatbot, with consistent answers, without any support path, it could generate anxiety. What made the activity interesting was this middle ground: I already had some familiarity with technology, but I needed to mobilize reading, interpretation, prompt writing, testing, and adjustments to achieve a better result.
In this sense, technology ceased to be just a resource and became part of the learning process itself. The chatbot wasn't a digital ornament to present the content, but an artifact that forced me to think about the three questions of PBL: how to integrate STEAM into courses, what characteristics make software more accessible and meaningful, and what pedagogical, technical, economic, and formative criteria should guide this choice. In trying to get Dumbledore to respond well, I also needed to respond better for myself.
The post about Flow also helped me realize that engagement doesn't appear automatically just because we use digital technology. A chatbot can be a powerful activity, but it can also become a mechanical task if there's no pedagogical intention. Flow depends on this calibration: the student needs to be challenged, but also needs to have the conditions to advance. In my case, the tests, errors, and adjustments to the prompt functioned as this progression, because each new attempt revealed a point for improvement.
It's interesting to note that PBL itself already carried this concern, because the problem didn't simply ask "which software to use?", but provoked reflection on choice, meaning, feasibility, and teacher training. This directly relates to the idea that technology doesn't produce learning on its own. It needs to be articulated with good planning, clear objectives, an interdisciplinary approach, and mediation that makes sense to the learner.
In the end, creating this chatbot was a fun but also very formative experience. I entered the activity thinking it would just be about building a creative response to the PBL, but I ended up realizing that the process of testing, making mistakes, adjusting, and justifying the bot was also a form of learning. I think that's when the activity came closest to Flow: when the challenge stopped being just "delivering a chatbot" and became making that artifact function as a bridge between the readings, the problem of the UEI, and a more meaningful pedagogical proposal.
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