The Research
Student Alienation in the Age of AI-Assisted Learning
What happens when students use AI to learn programming? They get answers faster.
Code appears. Problems get solved. But something crucial is lost.
My research investigates student alienation from their own learning
when AI becomes the intermediary between problem and solution. Students lose the struggle—the
essential cognitive work of developing pattern thinking that
transforms novices into programmers who truly understand.
This isn't anti-AI rhetoric. It's a philosophical examination of what learning actually is,
what cognition requires, and how we preserve the depth of understanding while teaching in an
AI-saturated world. The tools that promise to make learning easier might be making genuine
learning harder.
This work matters because we're training the next generation of technologists.
If they never develop the mental models that come from wrestling with complexity, genuine learning
doesn't occur—alienation takes root and understanding fails to materialize.