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Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
151–160 of 460 posts
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#152[flagged]
This comment looks like pure astroturfing.
> my kids love using this fantastic learning tool
> The friendly interaction between the Ello character and my kids gives them a fun motivation
> AI drives a love for reading
I cannot trust someone to assess a love for reading, if I also loathe their writing.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#153> Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right. Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing…
Elizabeth here, co-founder (and clinical child psychologist). Fair question. Catalin's post was about the engineering (he is my co-founder and our CTO), so the learning side got short shrift :). Here's what it actually looks like for a child. Say a 6-year-old is reading a story out loud (I will use a reading example here). The tutor is listening to every word. When she stumbles on "chick," it doesn't just tell her th…
> I'd push back a little on the framing that engagement and learning are separate things (anyone on our team will tell you this is a drum I have beaten for years). A disengaged child learns nothing, no matter how good the pedagogy is.
Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.
A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does teach how to use AI mean for grade schoolers? It’s a search engine for those purposes, the lesson is a blend of the Google and Wikipedia lessons.
No like in general not just for school - one of them taught their kid how to create their own bedtime stories, like with illustrations. Another one taught their kid how to make their own games with AI. Though yes I also literally have friends who have put their kids in alpha school which is SUPER ai. Like since i'm sure most of us work in software, how is this different from letting your kid learn how to code early.…
The whole point of AI is that it doesn't require advanced specialised knowledge to use; you literally can't fall meaningfully behind in it.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#155Super curious to hear from the parents here: Honestly, at this point isn't not exposing our kids to AI just setting them up to fail in the future? Like not letting them learn to use the internet? I have friends who are actually teaching their kids how to use AI because they don't want them to fall behind
I thought AI was supposed to get better and easier to use as time went on, so why should we bother to teach them now when it will be so easy to learn in the future?
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! Deeply admire what Sal Khan set out to do. One of the original pioneers of how technology could transform education. What we learnt from it: a chatbot is not enough to teach a child though. We need more to fully engage them and have the tools and context to truly teach them. We describe this in the blog post, curious what you think.
Being frank I think its not enough to have a good looking app and have some llm calls Think about your competition for your market. When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade. If your a student who wants to learn you have khan academy. And im just not seeing anything that screams-this is better than khan academy and kumon All i see is an education app wi…
> When I want my child to really excel in learning, I would force them into kumon - so they can skip a grade
Great - so now they're a year younger than all their peers in terms of emotional resilience. I've seen this play out time and time again, and it is disastrous for them and their ability to build relationships.
Pushing children ripe is never a good idea. If they're ahead of their peers, find other outlets for their intelligence. Teach them new skills, involve them in new hobbies. They need time to grow; education is a journey, not a race.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#157I strongly feel this should be illegal and the creators of this product should be judged, forbidden from holding any decision making positions in the future, and the families of the children compensated
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having those growing up None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic hum…
> is to have effective and empathetic human teachers In the vast majority of the developing world, there are hardly any of those! Here's a glimpse of what public education in India is like: https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-sorry-state-of-education-in-in...
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Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#159This has fabulous potential if implemented right. To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up. In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts. In hindsight these were j…
Yes, it's easy to forget context. Especially the time component. Several 100 k children will be born tomorrow. 100+ M in the coming year. Then in six years, almost all of them will hit schools. Schools which are, pervasively, really really bad.
What can we do to help them? Better teacher training? Better new teachers? Better new teacher colleges? Consider the latencies. A decade cohort is 1+ B kids.
So refining intervention safety and efficacy is nice. Especially for development problems. Less so for an acute humanitarian disaster. For maximizing the golden hour in crisis mass-casualty triage. In some literate and numerate sense, most of this last decade's 1+ B kids did not survive our collective care.
Re: Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having those growing up None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic hum…
Proven to be safe? Do you want a randomized trial? Do you demand that of every math tutorial video that goes up on YouTube?
I demand that does technological experiments involving children be supervised by someone who understands the ethical and moral effects it can have. Its not like a YouTube video.
We don’t move fast and break things when the things are kids, you maniacs