Organization of Educational and Project Activities of Students to Create Chat Bots as a Condition to Train Future Teachers

The future teachers training involves the formation of competencies for the development of software for various purposes, design of automated systems for managing real objects. The development of relevant qualities in higher education is complicated by a number of problems of a different nature. The authors propose to organize the project activities of students to create interactive programs (training bots) to improve the training of future specialists.Methodology. Project-based learning is used to form competencies in the field of informatization of education, to obtain in-demand soft skills, and to unite the team. The construction of a chat bot takes place in teamwork. The experiment involved 43 students of the North Caucasian Federal University in area of training 44.03.05 Pedagogical education with two training profiles. The assessment of the quality of educational results was carried out using the author's testing of 10 tasks ("passed"/"not passed"). Fisher's test was used to establish statistically significant differences.Research results. Students study services for creating chat bots, analyze the didactic potential and functionality of the programs received, and apply them to solve problems. The features of the presented variant of the organization of educational activities on the creation of chat bots are described: teamwork, the use of templates and scripts, the choice of project topics.In conclusion, problematic questions are formulated, the answers to which make it possible to determine the directions of work on the design of chat bots: discussion of the development goal and didactic goal, the use of blocks and actions, modeling interaction scenarios, etc.