AI as a Smart Assistant: A Systematic Literature Review of Design Students in Creative Programming

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) fields has further expanded their integration into design fields.Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are now being used as part of creative mediums.Despite the growing trend, there are still limited boundaries defined for of AI's role in design contexts.This systematic literature review explores AI's role in creative programming classes for design students with no prior knowledge in programming.The study follows the PRISMA framework guideline, reviewing journals indexed in Scopus from January 2020 to April 2025, written in English, and clearly defined the use of AI in creative programming education.The results show that AI is used as a smart assistant to generate programming code and support personalized learning experience in programming.However, the use of AI also promotes increasing reliance on the technology itself, potentially limiting student's ability to develop their own coding solutions.The main implication that can be taken from this study is a recommendation on how to use and limit AI usage in design education.