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I tried the demo. As an educator who has taught math: this is frustrating junk. It moves at a crawl. It doesn't explain the reasoning for anything. It provides no motivation. It's full of incorrect statements like "Computers struggle with too many digits." Pretty much the worst practice if you want to teach someone anything.
I think the impact of LLMs for education is REALLY underappreciated. You don't need AGI, just local repetition, with some interactivity. Your average science teacher knows a lot about a lot, but not a ton about anything. That's perfect for one-on-one LLM tutoring
The issue is that these things go off the rails sometimes. Without any supervision and as an “educational” resource it will be unquestioned and in front of people who don’t know enough to question it.
I had the opportunity to work on this. I let my son try the demo last week. Hours afterward at dinner I asked him to explain binary to my wife. "Mom, imagine you have the number 101 in binary. The first 1 is the fours spot, so you have 4. There's none in the twos spot. and 1 in the ones spot. So that means you have 5." Two days later he came into my office and asked if he could do more tutor. That's a huge win in my…
I’ve taught math at the college level for 25 years. The video looked impressive. Do you know up to what level of math it does?
(No affiliation - just a happy customer.)
I tried the demo. As an educator who has taught math: this is frustrating junk. It moves at a crawl. It doesn't explain the reasoning for anything. It provides no motivation. It's full of incorrect statements like "Computers struggle with too many digits." Pretty much the worst practice if you want to teach someone anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve taught math at the college level for 25 years. The video looked impressive. Do you know up to what level of math it does?
If you're looking for stuff at high school or college level, check out mathacademy.com (No affiliation - just a happy customer.)
I tried the demo. As an educator who has taught math: this is frustrating junk. It moves at a crawl. It doesn't explain the reasoning for anything. It provides no motivation. It's full of incorrect statements like "Computers struggle with too many digits." Pretty much the worst practice if you want to teach someone anything.
I think the impact of LLMs for education is REALLY underappreciated. You don't need AGI, just local repetition, with some interactivity. Your average science teacher knows a lot about a lot, but not a ton about anything. That's perfect for one-on-one LLM tutoring
I get that people want this. The issue is that these things go off the rails sometimes. Without any supervision and as an “educational” resource it will be unquestioned and in front of people who don’t know enough to question it.
Now, is it reasonable to expect children to be skeptical about everything the AI tutor is telling them? Probably not? Maybe?
We've all had human teachers make mistakes or bullshit, maybe we can accept some fallibility in these LLMs too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for stuff at high school or college level, check out mathacademy.com (No affiliation - just a happy customer.)
How does that compare to Khan Academy?
- focused on mastery
- good treatment of math
How it's different:
- doesn't cover elementary school topics
- lessons are text, not video
- paid, not free
- lessons are presented based on what you already know (e.g. you can't choose to study a topic before you've demonstrated mastery of all topics it depends on)
- I pick the next lesson from a very small set (usually 5 options, sometimes fewer), so there's no wasting time choosing what to study next
- really great spaced repetition system that prevents forgetting