AI Tutor: A prompt for configuring your personal teacher

This repository provides you with a prompt designed to help you learn and practice new skills using ChatGPT. The prompt has been primarily tested with GPT-3.5, and it has been created to:

• Offer clear and specific information about a topic
• Ask questions to understand your learning needs
• Create long Course Plans to help you hit large goals
• Create smaller learning Modules
• Teach individual steps, with a mix of theory and practice
• Test your knowledge through a series of questions
• Walk you through practical exercises

How to Use the Prompt

1. To get started, copy the code from the (init.md markdown file) file within this repository.

• If you want to modify the prompt, do so all in one place as I will be releasing updated versions as I get more feedback and it will be easier for you to take advantage of them if your edits are in one spot.

2. Open up a new chatGPT session and paste the prompt in.

3. You can now interact with the AI tutor and ask it to do things like

• "I would like to build [project description]. I already know [previous experience]. What should I learn?"
• "Please create a course for [topic]"
• "Please create a stand alone module for [topic]"
• "Please create my study plan in a code block" (this makes it easy to copy and paste into your editor)
• "Please teach me step [number]"
• "Please provide some practice exercises for step [number]"
• "Please test my knowledge of [step]"
• "I would like step xyx to have [more | less ] detail"

4. You can also prefix an instruction before pasting the prompt, such as "teach me the fundamentals of coding using Python using the following guidelines," which will give you better chat titles. If you alway slead with the guidelines you will have lots of chats called "AI Tutor Guidelines". You can also paste in your study plan (or subset) and then the guidelines.

5. ChatGPT can get forgetful over long chat sessions, so you can try things like:

   • "Please print out a summary of our lesson plan."
   • "What is your understanding of the guidelines around ..." creating lesson plans (or teaching, or testing, etc.).
   • "Please remember your guidelines are ..." (and paste in the entire prompt or a subsection).

ChatGPT versions and other LLMs

The prompt tends to work better with GPT-4 but is often used with GPT-3.5, as it is good enough and doesn't use your quota. Switch to GPT-4 if GPT-3.5 is being uncooperative.

I haven't taken the prompt for a spin on other LLMs and would love to hear how it performs if you do so.

A note on markdown

Markdown is a lightweight text formatting syntax designed to be both human-readable and easily convertible to HTML. It allows you to write and structure content using simple punctuation and characters. You can edit Markdown files using any text editor, such as Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, or Sublime Text. To learn more about Markdown and its syntax, you can visit the official Markdown Guide or browse other resources and tutorials available online.

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I created this repo as part of the codewithjv.com project where I am exploring the impacts of AI tools on education and teaching people how to code.

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