# HiTA for CMSE 202

https://app.hita.ai

HiTA is an AI-powered virtual assistant designed for education that turns course materials into an interactive, conversational study tool for students. It helps learners clarify concepts, test understanding, and prepare for exams through guided dialogue rather than just giving answers.

HiTA is a Large Language Model (LLM; like ChatGPT or Claude) that uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This allows the AI assistant to respond to you much in the same way that other publicly available LLMs are able to, but it grounds its responses in the actual course content and your prior conversations, striving to answer your questions using concepts you should know and providing guidance based on your experience level with Python. It will also try to do more than just provide direct answers to your questions. Instead, the HiTA assistant will seek to help you think about how to tackle the problems you’re presented with in a way that should, ideally, enhance your overall understanding of the material. 

Around Day 4 of this course, you will have the opportunity to start engaging with HiTA.  You should receive an invitation email from HiTA enabling you to login using your MSU NetID credentials just like you would any other MSU service. Once you’re logged in, you should see a CMSE 202 AI assistant specifically built for this course (you should see it as a little CMSE logo in the left-hand sidebar interface). If you can’t find the email, you should also be able to access it here: https://app.hita.ai 

All of the conversations you have with the AI assistant will be anonymized so, although instructors will be able to see what sorts of questions you are asking, no one will be able to determine who is asking which questions. Being able to see the sorts of questions you’re asking will provide the instructional team additional insights into how you are doing with learning the material. 

To help you get comfortable with using the tool, Dr. Silvia prepared a video (albeit for a different course, CMSE 801) that shows you some of the ways in which you can interact with the tool. Video is available here: https://mediaspace.msu.edu/media/HiTA+Demo/1_2l3v6gpa 

Additional information on how to use the system is available in the HiTA user guide: https://docs.hita.ai/user-guide