A Teaching Minute brings you teaching tips from the CTL.
AI in a Civil Engineering Course
Friday, 2/27/2026
This year, many of our Teaching Minutes will spotlight the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at UVM by featuring faculty who presented at the UVM SoTL Symposium. These pieces will highlight their teaching innovations or experiments, with topics ranging from incremental teaching improvements to more formally researched interventions, and what they've learned along the way. The Symposium is now held each spring, hosted by the CTL and the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, with support from the Office of the Provost.
Dr. Priyantha Wijesinghe (Civil and Environmental Engineering) presented research at the 2025 SoTL Symposium about how (and why) she's integrated AI assignments into her civil engineering course, Structural Steel Design.
Her goals were twofold: to help students build AI literacy by understanding the strengths and limitations of the tools, and to learn if/how students were already using these tools and how they felt about them. To support these goals, she designed two low-stakes assignments that encouraged reflective engagement with AI.
Assignment One:
Writing, Fact-Checking, and Reflecting
In the first assignment, students were asked to intentionally use GenAI to write a short essay about a specific steel structure which they could either choose themselves or ask AI to choose the structure for them. (65% chose it themselves and 35% let AI choose.) Using prompts provided by Priyantha, students had AI generate an essay that included both factual information, such as construction date, cost, and key designers, and more analytical elements, including structural form, materials, design features, and an overall critique of the design.
Verification and Revision
After generating the essay, students were required to fact-check the content using credible sources. They identified inaccuracies and corrected them, highlighting their revisions in a different color. They also submitted a list of references used for verification.
Finally, students wrote a brief reflection, without AI assistance, on their experience using the AI tool and their assessment of its value.
What Students Reported
Students were largely disappointed with the quality of the AI-generated essays. Many felt that reviewing and correcting the essays took more time than if they had written the essays themselves. However, this is why the assignment proved valuable: students became more aware of AI’s limitations, including its biases, oversimplifications, and lack of contextual understanding. Their responses overwhelmingly showed they understood the need to verify AI-generated content.
Assignment Two:
Critical Engagement–Reading and Reflecting on AI in Civil Engineering
For this assignment, students read and reflected on two articles: “What Does Human-machine Intelligence Mean for Civil Engineers?” (Source: ASCE Source) and “How Generative AI will Change the Jobs of Architects and Civil Engineers” (Source: Forbes.com).
Again, students were given prompts to consider but, this time, they were given a choice: write the reflection independently or use AI to write it.
If they chose to use AI, students were asked to follow the steps of recording their interactions with the tool, differentiating their edits again, and writing a reflection about how AI influenced their learning experience. Priyantha was particularly interested in whether—and how—students would choose to rely on AI after their experience with the first assignment.
Transparency and Thoughtful Choices
Interestingly, most students chose not to use AI for the second assignment preferring to write independently after their earlier assignment experience. Their various thoughtful reflections considered the promise of AI in civil engineering, such as applications in forecasting and design as well as serious concerns about ethics, professional responsibility, and the continuing need for human judgment and creativity.
Preparing Engineers for an AI-Influenced Future
Comparing these assignments over two years, Priyantha noticed the difference just one year makes! In the second year she ran these assignments, students came in with more prior experience using AI and showed greater awareness of when it could be helpful and when it could interfere with learning. They also reflected that these assignments increased their metacognitive awareness by prompting them to think about their own learning and how their choices around using AI affect it.
Priyantha was struck by the maturity of their reflections and their cautious stance toward AI, but she also expressed concern about students’ overreliance on AI in earlier courses, especially in coding. She emphasized that while AI will continue to reshape education and engineering practice, faculty need to be active in guiding its responsible use—because helping students develop critical thinking, ethical awareness, and informed judgment is essential preparation for the future.
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