Guiding Inquiry Without Giving Answers: Experiences of Pedagogically Designed Chatbot in Teacher Education

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Abstract
This study explores the development and implementation of a teacher-controlled pedagogical chatbot for a teacher education course to support inquiry-based science learning. The chatbot was designed to support pre-service teachers in bird species identification without providing direct answers. Instead, it encouraged observation, questioning, and reflective thinking. The development process involved iterative development of prompts and the use of teacher-created materials to guide the chatbot's responses. This article focuses on the experiences of the development team who designed the chatbot. The team consisted of an AI expert and two lecturers who were responsible for conducting the course. The data was collected using a group interview after the course where the chatbot was used. The actual course involved 210 pre-service teachers. Interview data showed both potential and challenges related to the use of chatbots in education. The experiment highlighted the importance of teachers' roles in shaping AI tools to align with their pedagogical goals and provided interesting perspectives about the possibilities of using chatbots in fostering pre-service teachers' learning.