One morning this spring, a dozen students gathered around a communal table in the classroom, their eyes glued to a math class on their laptops.
Sixth graders at Khan Lab School, an independent school with an elementary campus in Palo Alto, California, worked on quadratic equations, graph functions, and Venn diagrams. However, when questions arose, many did not immediately call their teachers for help.
Using text boxes on the sidelines of class, they enlisted help from Khanmigo, an experimental chatbot tutor for schools that uses artificial intelligence.
The tutoring bot immediately responded to one of her students, Xayah, asking her to identify a specific data point in the graph. Kanmigo then persuaded her to use her data points to solve her math problem.
“It’s very good at solving problems step by step,” says Zaya. “Then they will congratulate you every time you help solve a problem.”
Khan Lab School students are among the first US schoolchildren to try out an experimental conversational chatbot aimed at simulating one-on-one human tutoring. The tool responds to students with clear, fluid writing and is specifically designed for use in schools.
Based on the AI models underlying chatbots like ChatGPT, these automated learning aids could revolutionize teaching and learning in the classroom. A mock tutor makes it easy for many self-directed students to hone their skills, delve deeper into topics that interest them, or tackle new subjects at their own pace.
Such unproven automated tutoring systems can also make mistakes, encourage cheating, degrade the teacher’s role, and impede critical thinking in schools, giving students the opportunity to learn algorithms. Subjects will be tested, which is equivalent to educational experiments by Or, like many promising technology tools before them, bots may do little to improve academic outcomes.
Khanmigo is one of a wave of new AI-powered learning tools. Developed by non-profit education giant Khan Academy, its video tutorials and exercises are used by tens of millions of students.
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy and another nonprofit, Khan Lab School, said he hopes chatbots will allow students to receive personalized tutoring. He also said it could be of great help to teachers in doing tasks such as lesson planning, allowing teachers to spend more time with their students.
“This will effectively allow every student in the United States, and ultimately the planet, to have a world-class personal tutor,” Khan said.
Hundreds of public schools are already using Khan Academy’s online classes in math and other subjects. The nonprofit, which introduced Khanmigo earlier this year, is currently piloting the tutoring bot with school districts, including Newark Public Schools in New Jersey.
Khan said Khan Academy has developed a bot with guardrails for schools. These include a monitoring system designed to alert teachers if a student using Khanmigo appears to be obsessed with self-harm or other issues. Khan said his group is studying the effectiveness of kanmigo and plans to make kanmigo widely available to districts this fall.
Thousands of schools in the US are already using analytical AI tools like plagiarism detection systems and adaptive learning apps designed to automatically adjust lessons to a student’s reading level. But proponents envision the new AI-assisted tutoring system as a game-changer in education, as it acts more like a student’s collaborator than inert software.
With AI’s linguistic capabilities, some enthusiasts are proclaiming that simulated tutors may soon be able to respond to students as individually as human tutors.
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has said that “AI will acquire that ability and become as good a tutor as humans have ever been.” said at a recent conference For investors in educational technology. (Khan Academy receives her over $10 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
It remains to be seen whether bots can provide the empathetic support and genuine encouragement that make human tutors particularly effective.
For more than a century, educational entrepreneurs have envisioned classroom devices programmed to automatically test and provide instruction to students.
Education writer Audrey Watters says in her book: “Teaching Machine”‘, researchers in the 1920s began to argue that automatic teaching devices would revolutionize education. They promised that the machine would free teachers from tedious tasks and allow students to study at their own pace and receive automated feedback.
Over the decades, schools rushing to adopt the latest automated teaching technology often found their systems cumbersome or flawed. Some conclude that automated tools did little to improve student outcomes.
New chatbots are now launching new campaigns for automated teaching materials. Canmigo highlights the educational promises and potential drawbacks of this technology.
Khan Academy began developing chatbot tutoring software last fall with the goal of evaluating the potential of AI to improve learning. The system uses GPT-4, a large-scale language model created by OpenAI, the research institute behind ChatGPT.
Khan said he wants to create a system that helps guide students rather than just handing them answers. So Khan, a developer in his academy, designed Khan Migo so that Socrates could use his methods. I often ask students to explain their thoughts as a way to encourage them to resolve their own doubts.
Khanmigo provides support for a wide range of subjects, including elementary mathematics, middle school American history, high school civics, and college-level organic chemistry. There’s also the ability to invite students to chat with fictional characters like Winnie the Pooh or simulated historical figures like Marie Curie.
AI systems based on large language models can also fabricate false information. This is because the model is designed to predict the next word in the sequence. They don’t stick to facts.
To improve Khanmigo’s math accuracy, Khan Academy developers created a multi-step process. Behind the scenes, the system derives answers to math problems and matches them with student answers. Still, Khan Academy’s tutoring system displays a warning at the bottom of the screen that says, “Khanmego makes mistakes sometimes.”
With over $30,000 in annual tuition, Khan Lab School provides an ideal test bed for bot tutoring. Silicon Valley schools have small class sizes and an entrepreneurial spirit that encourages children to pursue their passions and learn at their own pace. Tech-savvy students are used to fiddling with digital tools.
One morning this spring Jaclyn MajorKhan’s elementary school STEM expert watched as students playfully tested the limits of the bot.
One student asked Kanmigo to explain a math problem using song lyrics. Another user asked for math help with “Gen Z slang.”
“Can you do one more thing and explain everything in Korean?” a third person said in a text conversation with the chatbot.
Kanmigo dutifully fulfilled his duty. Each student was then encouraged to return to the math task at hand.
Ms. Major said she appreciated how the system interacted with her students in an engaging way.
“Canmigo connects with them and allows them to be on their level if they want to,” she said. “I think it would be useful in any classroom.”
It’s too early to tell whether Khanmigo will be equally appealing to other audiences, such as public schools with large class sizes and students less accustomed to driving their own learning.
Sixth grader Xayah runs into trouble in her classroom. Her Ms. Canmigo asked her to explain how she came up with her answer to the problem in her dataset. The bot then incorrectly suggested that she may have made a “small mistake” in her calculations.
She quickly advised the AI chatbot, “19 + 12 is 31 Kanmigo.”
Kanmigo replied, “I apologize for my mistake earlier.” “Certainly you are right.”
This may prove to be one of the most important lessons for school children using the promising new tutoring bot. Don’t believe all AI-generated text.
“Remember, we’re testing it,” Major reminded his students. “We are learning, and it is learning.”
