India
Geometry lesson from cutting pizza: What if learning was so much fun? | India News – Times of India
The problem is not with geometry, mathematics or chemistry. It’s just that learning it doesn’t feel as fun as a favorite hobby or meal.
But what if this fun gap is soon reduced – and ultimately eliminated? Here’s an example of a teacher trying to do that. We asked the teacher to explain geometric angles using pizza analogy. The answer it gave, in seconds, was:
“Imagine you are at a pizza party. When you cut the pizza into slices, the slices intersect in the middle, creating different angles between the slices.
Adjacent corners are like two slices next to each other. They share a common benefit (the cut) and together they form a larger part of the pizza.
Complementary angles are like two slices that, when joined, form half a pizza (180 degrees).
Vertical angles are like the slices directly opposite each other. No matter how you cut the pizza, the opposite slices will always be the same size.”
The teacher also provided an interactive chart explaining these angles and asked if we wanted to understand angles through music, sports, car (or some other) analogy.
The pizza-to-corner explanation above was just a start. It was followed by a simple quiz to test the student’s level of understanding, followed by a tailored series of exercises and explanations. The teacher can translate instructions into Hindi and a few other Indian languages.
The teacher called Flexiis not a human being but one AI tool developed by the US-based CK-12 Foundation, which describes its mission as “empowering every student to learn their own way.” Neeru Khoslaco-founder of CK-12 and wife of an Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khoslasays: “Every student has a different learning pace, different interests and different goals. Time and resource constraints make it challenging for educators to treat individuals as students. We combine high-quality content with the latest technologies to provide students, teachers and parents with everything they need – for free.”
Flexi is the latest of many initiatives from the foundation, including FlexBooks — adaptable and interactive textbooks — and Adaptive practicewhich tailors exercises to the student’s skill level. Flexi’s use of generative AI (gen AI) allows the company to leverage CK-12’s resources and deliver a personalized learning experience.
Flexi was launched in India in August this year and is already used by almost a million students in the country. While it’s currently free, the company says there may eventually be a small fee to cover costs. More than 300 million students, teachers and parents in 13 countries have used Flexi worldwide.
Geometry lesson through basketball: what if learning was so much fun?
This user database provides valuable insights. For example, if a student often asks to rephrase the questions, this may indicate difficulty understanding the underlying concept. With just 2 to 4 questions, Flexi’s AI can assess whether the student’s understanding matches the grade level or whether it is above or below that level.
While the internet has over time become a tool to democratize knowledge, AI is a tool to personalize knowledge. On the Internet you can watch or read lectures from leading professors from the best universities in the world. But those lectures are not tailored to your level of knowledge, interests and language use. AI can do that at a scale, speed and price that was unthinkable just a few years ago.
But translating the promise of personalization into reality takes work – a lot of work. For example, a AI teacher shouldn’t give answers to questions. It’s a learning tool, not a cheat sheet for finding answers. This means training AI to provide a path to the solution, rather than providing the solution itself. It’s also about understanding a wide range of possible clues, using the right visuals and making them interactive to ensure learning is engaging and fun. And deliver it all in a user interface that works across all devices and languages.
Then there is the question of how much we should rely on AI. Flexi offers the option to choose between explanations and answers generated by AI, and those generated using its own library of books and explainers. It also highlights the fact that AI can make mistakes and contains links stating its limitations.
This begs the question: how should an AI teacher like Flexi be used? Is it a replacement for teachers or even schools? The answer is no. And that doesn’t diminish its usefulness or necessity.
We have known for a long time that every child learns differently. However, until now there has been no practical way to provide personalized education for every child, especially in a country like India, where 200 million schoolchildren study in different languages, and often with parents who lack the money, time or education lack to be able to do this. support them. AI tutors like Flexi can help schools and teachers combine the benefits of group learning with personal attention.
In a recent Netflix documentary ‘What Next? What can AI do for us/for us? A teacher at an American school introduces her students to an AI assistant that writes essays. After the students experiment with the tool, she asks how many of them will use it in the future, rather than queuing up to her for help. Many hands in the class go up. “It doesn’t mean I’m not there. I’m still here to help,” she tells the class. That’s an example of how AI, if designed and implemented properly, can’t hurt teachers and schools.
The jobs that AI teachers could and should take away are those of private tutors. The growth of private tutoring and coaching in India reflects the decline in the quality of school education, especially in government schools. For many poor families, these teachers have become a poor but expensive addition to school that they cannot do without. Solutions like Flexi could provide a much better alternative for such teachers at little or no cost.
TOI had also reviewed Khan Academy’s AI Tutor ‘Khanmigo’ earlier this year. You can read the review here.
