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Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

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Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#121

Post by rhetocj23 »

non_aligned wrote: post #96
floatrock wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea -- find what they like and explain the concepts with custom-tailored analogues. I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be: > Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a g…

> It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs? The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of i…

"a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life."

Haha, you think most Googlers understand this? No chance.

This is why products like this fail, dead on arrival - the person leading the charge simply doesnt get it.

But hey go ahead and burn the cash of shareholders.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#122

Post by blibble »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #92
apwell23 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea this is stupid . agreed. I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem. existing material is clear enough to learn from.

Theres a reason why theres a grave yard of Google's dead projects. Its annoying that software is such a high gross margin industry - I would love to see Googles cash get taken away so they cant take these vanity projects.

if the US government had done its job and split google's monopolistic ad business into what should be 4 different companies, then we wouldn't have this problem

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#123

Post by rhetocj23 »

blibble wrote: post #122
rhetocj23 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a reason why theres a grave yard of Google's dead projects. Its annoying that software is such a high gross margin industry - I would love to see Googles cash get taken away so they cant take these vanity projects.

if the US government had done its job and split google's monopolistic ad business into what should be 4 different companies, then we wouldn't have this problem

The average ROIC is doing a nice job in compensating for their awful marginal ROIC.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#124

Post by lo_zamoyski »

lawlessone wrote: post #85
cjs_ac wrote: post #10

I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation. The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that under…

Would simulation games work here? Just giving the students access to something that simulates a frictionless world to play around with? maybe with a simple on off switch. Something i've probably seen shared by others here in webgl at some point and far cheaper to run than genai

Why not a slippery surface? Simulations are less compelling (as they aren't the real thing and put the cart before the horse; the simulation presupposes physical laws, but doesn't demonstrate them) than a real example.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#125

Post by meander_water »

anonfunction wrote: post #5

Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions. It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper. The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env…

This looks great. Just fyi this is also possible via alphaxiv's assistant. Navigate to a paper, click tools -> assistant.

[0] https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#126

Post by iLoveOncall »

Imnimo wrote: post #14

I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include: "a list can be used for a recipe" "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" "a map can be used for a cookbook" "a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen" "a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together" May…

My issue with that it's more that those are extremely poor analogies.

The first 3 are simply plain wrong.

GenAI's gonna GenAI I guess.

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#128

Post by ancarda »

summarity wrote: post #127

Does anyone remember the Person of Interest episode which saw the gang destroy a Samaritan-run startup to prevent it from usurping children’s education (via free tablets and AI powered teaching)? Anyway …

Yes and Finch wasn’t sure if what team Machine had done was a good thing, which is interesting given he’s usually so sure about resisting Samaritan

Re: Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

#130

Post by sky2224 »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #98
sky2224 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as a student, I have to agree. The issue with learning things isn't that it hasn't been tailored to be interesting or relatable to me, it's just that it's a lot of content and it's hard. The solution is figuring out how to set up a type of spoon feed algorithm that checks that I'm understanding little bite size pieces along the way in addition to giving layman's terms for things that don't necessitate the forma…

Khan academy and brilliant are both excellent. They're hand crafted and limited in subjects and depth, but i think establish the current "roof" in how perfectly structured self-learning materials would look. I've heard from teachers using them in schools and found excellent results. AI rephrasing words better to each individual isn't interesting to me. Automatic Interactive small quizzes, puzzles, and self adjusting…

Here's a conversation using ChatGPT Study Mode I had a little bit ago covering Linear Algebra concepts that I wanted to learn. The concepts that were gone over in this chat aren't the most complicated, but I think you might find it interesting to look over since I think it actually does show we'll likely reach the level you're seeking. This conversation is with 4o shortly before the GPT-5.0 rollout, which is why it's a little less concise and more emotive.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc844a-14d4-8009-88e3-53f5d781b5...

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