We report here on students’ views of example generation tasks assigned to them in two first year undergraduate Calculus courses. The design and use of such tasks was undertaken as part of a project which aimed to afford students opportunities to develop their thinking skills and their conceptual understanding. In interviews with ten students, we found that on the whole they viewed the example generation tasks as unfamiliar and sometimes difficult, but also as beneficial for promoting conceptual understanding and independent thinking. In addition, some students characterized these tasks as ‘the backwards ones’.