2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper investigates the development and use of a chatbot in an engineering curriculum. The chatbot helps students find course materials, answer general inquiries, schedule meetings with professors and teaching assistants, and much more. Students require academic and administrative assistance in their journey as undergraduates at universities. College life is stressful, and tasks such as keeping track of deadlines, scheduling meetings, and finding resources become daunting as the semester progresses. The constant email exchanges about general course information could also become tedious for the course instructors. The authors developed a chatbot to address these difficulties using The Microsoft Power Virtual Agents App (MS PVA). MS PVA was selected as the platform since it requires minimal coding. It is a graphical programming environment that requires configuring and connecting nodes. The development stages need to be well planned. Some items to consider are setting up a hierarchical system to store information that the chatbot needs to retrieve, and creating a shared department email address to send and receive meeting requests. The chatbot was designed to handle all repetitive tasks, thus freeing the instructors time for answering more meaningful questions. The chatbot also promotes self-learning as it allows the student to ask questions beyond office hours and get a response. The chatbot developed is set up to source information from existing databases of deadlines, file directories, questions, and answers. Hence, it does not require reprogramming for a new course. The instructor needs to tabulate all necessary information in a predetermined location. Future variations of the chatbot will help students with coursework by providing them with practice problems when prompted. It will assist them further by giving instant feedback on their responses. Thus, students will get to practice and prepare for a course as they see fit. Since this process will be automated and randomized, the chatbot will never run out of problems. The chatbot will record any question that it is unable to answer. The instructors can further develop the chatbot's repository to answer those questions. The chatbot's impact on the student's university experience is measured in a class by conducting class surveys among the students. The authors have planned a pilot study of the chatbot and its implementation for a course in Spring 2023. Results will be reported in the final paper.