by Cedarville University
This story is part of Cedarville Magazine’s summer 2026 issue: Why AI? Biblical Wisdom for Bold Change. You can visit the Cedarville Magazine webpage for the full issue.
Nearly one year ago, Cedarville University announced it would become the first Christian university to provide campuswide access to ChatGPT Edu through a partnership with OpenAI. Guided by biblical principles, Cedarville students, faculty, and staff have spent the past year exploring. Together, they learned the tools and developed AI use cases to help the University thrive. Now, we’re celebrating the progress our campus has made by sharing some of the uses our campus community has embraced.
“Millerbot” Helps Students Find Course Clarity
Dr. Chris Miller, Senior Professor of Biblical Studies, began creating custom GPT tools after noticing that his students were already using AI to study for his classes but were often receiving inconsistent or misaligned answers. Setting out to provide reliable, course-connected support that extended his teaching beyond the classroom, he has developed tools that allow students to ask questions, receive feedback on assignments, and practice their skills with guidance.
Dr. Miller has found that AI dramatically reduces creative teaching barriers like time, scale, and technical complexity, making it possible to create high-quality learning resources quickly. Much of his learning came through experimentation along with feedback from students and colleagues. Dr. Miller stresses that the real challenge is no longer whether something can be built but how creatively and intentionally AI can be used to better serve students and deepen learning.
Career Services AI Guidance Helps Students With Role-Based Interview Prep
Cam Arminio, Associate Director of Career Services, has found that ChatGPT can move beyond basic job-search help to function as a practical career coach. He teaches students to use AI to identify the skills employers are seeking based on the job description and compare those skills to their résumés to help them prepare more targeted, role-based interview responses. Students are learning to communicate their value more clearly and strategically and use language their interviewers will connect to.
For students, Cam recommends using ChatGPT to refine emails, strengthen résumés and LinkedIn profiles, and help boost critical thinking when developing answers. Used effectively, AI can also support professional growth by helping users build development plans and role play interviews. The key is to stay actively involved, using AI to guide and challenge your thinking while ensuring your authentic voice and ideas remain at the center.
Computer Engineering Students Develop AI Home Assistant Tool
Cedarville computer engineering students are creating an AI-powered robot called Alfred to support older adults living independently. The project aims to help bridge the care gap between a rapidly aging population and a shortage of caregivers.
Alfred uses voice interaction, computer vision, and audio processing to assist with daily tasks, provide medication reminders, detect falls, and alert caregivers or emergency services. Unlike many existing home robots that emphasize security or companionship, Alfred focuses on safety and accessibility for seniors.
While still in development, this prototype reflects the broader efforts of Cedarville students to use AI to address the needs of vulnerable populations and to promote the biblical values of care and dignity for all image-bearers.
Brian Shook Improves How Work Gets Done
In his work as the Associate Vice President for Graduate Enrollment, Dr. Brian Shook has grown from curiosity to making an everyday impact on his team using ChatGPT. What began as simply experimenting with new approaches to tasks evolved; now, he has integrated AI to improve his daily work processes. The lesson? Dr. Shook has found that AI becomes most effective when he uses it to improve how work gets done, not just to check tasks off his list.
He incorporates AI early to capture notes and ideas in real time, then uses clear prompts to organize, categorize, and prioritize these notes into usable outputs like a weekly briefing for his team. This reduces last-minute scrambling and improves the whole team’s accuracy.
Shook also uses AI to challenge his assumptions, reveal blind spots, and role-play difficult conversations. His strategies demonstrate that effective AI usage depends on clear inputs, intentional prompts, and active human judgment — allowing the tool to deepen and enhance your own thinking rather than replace it.
Nate Scott Fine-Tunes CU Connect Portal With AI Assistance
Nate Scott, Assistant Director of Research and Reporting, used ChatGPT as a coding assistant during the development of CU Connect, a new portal that offers valuable information and services to alumni and donors. ChatGPT helped him generate and refine JavaScript for interactive features, speed up time-intensive development tasks, and troubleshoot technical challenges. He also used it to accelerate coding tasks, experiment with new ideas, and generate multiple solutions to technical challenges — making complex processes more efficient and approachable.
Scott developed his AI skills through the workshops and webinars offered through Cedarville. He has found the conversations shared across campus especially valuable for generating ideas and understanding effective, ethical use cases.
Scott emphasizes that effective use of AI depends on clear, intentional prompting; strong inputs lead to more efficient results, while vague prompts often slow the process down. Looking ahead, he sees AI as a valuable tool for idea generation, research, and analysis across his office.
Newsletter-Writing GPT Helps Campus Offices Communicate
Cedarville Marketing and Communications has created a custom GPT to help faculty and staff members across campus write announcements for Cedarville’s daily student and faculty/staff newsletters. The GPT reviews communication drafts and provides feedback on tone, clarity, structure, and audience alignment so writers can strengthen their own work.
Guided by Cedarville’s core brand and voice, the GPT helps ensure that communications from around campus consistently reflect the University’s Christ centered mission and transformational student experience. Writers across campus use it to polish newsletter content so their messages are clear, consistent, and well-received.
By offering clear, actionable recommendations, this tool helps teams create more engaging, on-brand content that resonates with the campus community.
OpenAI’s Codex Jumpstarts Electrical and Computer Engineering Curriculum
Dr. Clinton Kohl, Senior Professor of Computer Engineering, had been charged with creating a new class for electrical and computer engineering freshmen. The problem? Teaching the coding skills these students would need to complete the course project — a programmed car that can navigate through an elaborate obstacle course — would’ve taken too much of the course time away from the hands-on experience these students needed most.
Dr. Kohl knew AI tools could help his students learn to code and facilitate the course project, but even ChatGPT’s latest models didn’t have enough memory to carry out the complex projects these students needed to undertake. When Dr. Kohl discovered Codex just weeks after its launch, he knew he had found what he was looking for.
With Codex’s coding help, Dr. Kohl’s freshman engineering students are coding at a level he used to expect from juniors. And at the junior and senior levels, the progress is even more impressive. By building AI tools into the curriculum, Dr. Kohl and his colleagues are equipping their students to stand out and excel in fields that are changing with each new technological leap.
Student Project Helps Church Creative Teams Use AI for God’s Glory
Church creative teams — writers, designers, and the pastors that oversee them — are often volunteers without the infrastructure and support of a marketing team or agency. While AI can help these teams deliver professional results with limited resources, many church teams are looking for guidance on how to use these tools well — and struggling to find accessible options.
Luke Eyerly, a 2026 visual communication design graduate, met this need with his senior project: a decision-making framework to help church creative staff evaluate when to use AI. From interviews with current church staff, he discovered three key priorities: authorship, dependency, and restraint.
His decision tree breaks use cases down into three categories: ministry priorities that should never be outsourced, like preaching and biblical counseling; projects that can use AI assistance but should be human-led, like writing content and brainstorming ideas; and tasks that can be fully automated, like transcribing recordings and formatting content. The final result, a colorful, accessible booklet and decision tree poster, shows Cedarville students’ care for the local church.
