AI Singapore published a microcourse entitled “Designing Effective Prompts in ChatGPT for Educators”. Since I was keen to upskill myself, I went through the course to gather authentic insights on the art and science of prompt engineering. Here are my learning points.

3 takeaways from the course
- The acronym (RCRR) which stands for Role, Context, Request and Requirement. It’s easy to remember and will help me structure my prompts more systematically and effectively. It also gave me the idea that I should teach my students about the meaning of the word “context” (which isn’t really a word in their daily lexicon) so that they will know how to navigate the world out there.

- The different facets of teaching neatly categorised into Lesson Planning, Lesson Enactment, Assessment and Adminstration. Having a filing system that encompasses all the myriad tasks we can fulfill with the help of ChatGPT allows us to tackle our workload more intentionally and with less stress.

- The four different kinds of prompts (zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, generated knowledge prompting, directional stimulus prompting). I know how to get ChatGPT to generate a summary but learnt that I could ask it to create a precise summary that meets my needs by inputting certain keywords beforehand.

2 suggestions I have
- It might be good to explore the kind of prompts that would be best suited for use for a particular aspect of teaching. Case in point: if I wish to automate certain administrative tasks of teaching, should I use a generated knowledge prompt or directional stimulus prompt?

- It would be good to explore how different subject teachers would benefit differently from ChatGPT as a result of its strengths and weaknesses. For instance, ChatGPT doesn’t seem to understand abstract mathematical concepts.

1 thing I endeavour to do
- Consolidate the prompts I frequently use under the categories “Lesson Planning”, “Lesson Enactment”, “Assessment” and “Adminstrative”. Hopefully, doing so will spark off new ideas that will take my prompt engineering to the next level.