Integrating Generative AI into Environmental Engineering Sustainability Education: The Lorax as a Classroom Case Study

Engineering education has continually adapted to technological advancements, using emerging tools to enhance learning. A new potential rises with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which necessitates an exploration of their role in education. This study investigates the potential role of generative AI in sustainability engineering education through a case study involving student critique of a ChatGPT-generated essay on Dr. Suess’s The Lorax . Specifically, students in a sustainability engineering class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were tasked to reflect on questions regarding their use and experience with generative AI tools during their coursework. The overarching goal of this work is to generate insight as to student perceptions of AI in an educational context relevant to 2023, and has applications beyond sustainability. The analysis focusing on sentiment and topic discovering, reveals a general positive sentiment from students towards those tools. Students found merit in AI’s ability to personalize learning, generate ideas, help in writing and coding, and reducing time of different tasks. Negative sentiment was mostly influenced by shallow reasoning of the tool and confusion around its output. This suggests that students perceptive generative AI to be a useful tool in sustainability education and beyond, but not without caveats. Of course, as this work provides a snapshot in time, future work should focus on how students’ perceptions change with respect to the increased adoption and evolution of AI technologies.