Students' interest in knowledge acquisition in Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This study explores undergraduate students' interests and perceptions regarding Artificial Intelligence, revealing motivations, expectations, gender differences, and concerns about ethics, based on thematic analysis of survey responses.

Contribution

It provides new insights into student attitudes towards AI education, highlighting factors influencing interest and expectations, and comparing AI with database courses.

Findings

Students are interested in AI due to trendiness, applicability, and future prospects.

Men tend to aim for higher-level AI skills than women.

Mathematical aspects of AI are generally disliked by students.

Abstract

Some students' expectations and points of view related to the Artificial Intelligence course are explored and analyzed in this study. We anonymous collected answers from 58 undergraduate students out of 200 enrolled in the Computer Science specialization. The answers were analysed and interpreted using thematic analysis to find out their interests and attractive and unattractive aspects related to the Artificial Intelligence study topic. We concluded that students are interested in Artificial Intelligence due to its trendiness, applicability, their passion and interest in the subject, the potential for future growth, and high salaries. However, the students' expectations were mainly related to achieving medium knowledge in the Artificial Intelligence field, and men seem to be more interested in acquiring high-level skills than women. The most common part that wasn't enjoyed by the students was the mathematical aspect used in Artificial Intelligence. Some of them (a small group) were also aware of the Artificial Intelligence potential which could be used in an unethical manner for negative purposes. Our study also provides a short comparison to the Databases course, in which students were not that passionate or interested in achieving medium knowledge, their interest was related to DB usage and basic information.