Learning through analogies

Purpose

Analogies serve as a valuable tool in education, enabling learners to understand complex ideas by relating them to familiar concepts. Generative AI can be used to generate relevant and insightful analogies that enhance understanding and promote active learning.

Prompt

Note: The following prompts were tested in Microsoft Copilot for Web. It is most suitable for language based generative AI.

You are a computer science student about to attend a lecture on sorting techniques.  Explain how sorting techniques relates to searching techniques using analogies. Provide a summary in paragraphs and in each section compare and contrast the two concepts.

Alternatives:

You are a computer science tutor with years of experience. You task is to help me understand bubble sort and selection sort using an analogy. Use the same analogy to compare the two techniques.

You are a professor in business school and 15 years of teaching experience and an expert in your field. Come up with 3 creative analogies to explain the interplay between analysis techniques and performance of a project. Keep the tone academic.

You are an expert tutor in university-level exercise physiology. Come up with 3 creative analogies to explain the interplay between energy systems and cardiovascular responses to exercise.

Follow-up prompt (optional):

Can you explain it more in depth?

Provide me with more creative examples.

Explanation

This prompt engages the AI as a student tasked with drawing connections between new concepts and previously learned knowledge. The objective is to explain this relationship using creative analogies. By employing analogies, the AI can provide relatable comparisons that aid in understanding complex concepts.

This approach of using analogies is particularly valuable for lecture preparation and scenarios where a deeper understanding of how a new concept relates to prior knowledge is required. Analogies help bridge the gap between unfamiliar concepts and familiar ones, making it easier to grasp the interdependencies and interactions between different components.

If the initial explanation provided by the AI requires further clarification or additional information, follow-up prompts can be utilised to seek elaboration on specific aspects or to delve deeper into related subtopics. It's important to keep in mind that the analogies generated by the model may sometimes be vague, overly broad, or lack complete accuracy. Therefore, it is best to treat these analogies as a starting point for further understanding rather than relying solely on them.

Examples