Exploring elementary pre-service teachers’ instrumental genesis in designing AI chatbots

Based on an instrumental approach, this study explores how elementary pre-service teachers engage in instrumental genesis as they design artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots as teaching instruments for the “number and operations” domain. Eleven pre-service teachers participated in a prompt engineering lecture and developed chatbots. The findings revealed that the teachers assigned diverse instrumental functions to the AI chatbots, including supporting problem-solving, facilitating conceptual understanding, guiding problem-posing, and providing real-life application examples while actively incorporating scaffolding, bounded autonomy aligned with the curriculum, affective support, and gamification into their designs. Participants faced persistent issues in reconciling their instrumental intentions with the unpredictability and limitations of generative AI, particularly prompt interpretation and curriculum fidelity. These findings highlight the need for pre-service teacher education programs to offer reflective experiences with AI integration and foster adaptive design competencies, emphasizing the shift from technology adoption to empowering teachers as critical designers and mediators of AI instruments.