A design-based approach to analysing student engagement with a GenAI-Enabled brainstorming app

While there are several “writing buddy” Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) apps that check grammar and language usage, not many focus exclusively on enhancing the brainstorming process for writing across disciplines. To fill this gap, a team of staff and student assistants with programming and User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) expertise designed and prototyped a web app named “Waai,” which rhymes with ‘why,’ that could assist students throughout the writing process for a first-year general writing module for all undergraduate students at a Singaporean university. Utilising surveys, focus group discussions, and app data that shows the nature and type of student engagement with the Waai app, this paper studies the impact of one aspect of the Waai app, an uni-directional chatbot named “Nudgy,” as a first step to optimising interactions with an AI chatbot for writing purposes. Overall, we found that students were able to benefit from the GenAI chatbot Nudgy in 5 distinct ways: 1) its pre-engineered prompts, which were tailored to the course assignment rubrics; 2) its tendency to recommend topics to research rather than give students answers; 3) its suggested research topics, which helped students to consider different perspectives on their topics; 4) how it modelled ways to ideate new insights; and 5) its constant availability. Students, however, expressed reservations about the Nudgy, particularly in terms of: 1) the limitations of pre-engineered prompts within the app; 2) difficulty in discerning the most relevant of the Nudgy feedback; 3) mistrust in GenAI and Aigiarism; and 4) a recognition of the limitations of GenAI in supporting argumentative writing. “Waai” essentially presents a decision-making framework for brainstorming based on cognitive socialisation, a method of learning that emphasises inductive as opposed to deductive experience that could be applied to online environments, as an ideology of learning that considers, among other aspects, the development of selfhood, where learning is both guided and mediated (Kesebir & Gardner, 2010). In the context of asynchronous learning, meaning is not intrinsic but rather picked up through interactions on online platforms. Interacting with a chatbot with pre-designed prompts result in a ritual that both define and explore the limits of knowledge building. Symbolic interactionism (Aksan et al., 2009) through the medium of technology is a key objective of 21st century education, where ‘learning’ is internalised as an individual experience. Waai offers educatros additional understanding of the effects of personalization (Mygland et al., 2021) as proposed by this design-based study of the role of instruction in the creation of online ‘learning’ experiences. The centrality of instruction and standards of reasoning through the process of brainstorming suggests that the developmental stages of ‘learning’ concepts could empower a process for self-regulation (Zimmerman, 1989) that goes beyond immediate causes and effects to inspire a spiral of reflection and change essential to ideation.