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.
- 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
They don't grant degrees or diplomas. As such it is presumably accredited as a Supplementary Education Program and (like JHU CTY, Stanford ULO, and AoPS) do not grant credit. Such programs can be the basis of credits if your "real" high school accepts them, though.
Right, ymmv for transfers at either a hs or college. But the accredited status makes it possible to get approval. MA say they can make the documentation available manually and will automatically in the future.
I can't wait until this tech progresses to the point it can reliably tutor for more advanced courses like real analysis, group theory, linear algebra, etc. I actually wondered if it would be feasible to use NLP techniques to check user submitted answers to proof based problem, LLMs might be get there.
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.
They don't "struggle". Computers exhibit definite behavior when a program attempts to store or operate on numbers that are too large for the allocated space.
For integers, overflow behavior is pretty easy to understand.
Obviously I know this. As stated, in 3rd grade parlance it’s appropriate to say “they struggle”. Have you ever heard someone say, “I need a new computer; mine’s dying.”? This level of pedantic nitpicking is not appropriate for 3rd graders. I’ve heard professional programmers say that their computer struggles with compiling certain programs they are working on. Colloquialisms can be useful and they are ubiquitous.
It would be more accurate to say that calculating with very large integers or integer fractions with millions of digits can be slow on current computers - but it's still far beyond what humans can typically do without assistance.
Million-digit numbers are absurdly large in terms of physical quantities, but can easily arise when one is enumerating possibilities, such as the number of ways that one could give out randomized phone numbers to everyone in a city.
(That's the sort of explanation that my mathematically-inclined friends and I would have understood in grades 3-5, when we learned about integers, rational and irrational numbers, and basic probability/combinatorics, as well as simple algorithms for multi-digit arithmetic and conversion between integer and decimal fractions.)
Factorial and exponential functions were (and are) fun to play with on calculators because of the large numbers you can generate; python and mathematica are even more fun of course. I think recent TI and Casio graphing calculators support python, though I don't know about their bignum support or memory limits.
I think you missed that my comment was about explaining something to third graders or don’t understand what it means to explain something to people in that age group.
Not the allocated space, the bit width of the ALU. Besides, your explanation doesn't add anything to the description of 'struggle' beyond 'in a normal and expected fashion'.
Given that computers have calculated the value of Pi to more than 60 million digits , I think we can safely say that computers readily handle numbers with many digits.
A computer can’t display more digits than the number of particles in the observable universe. This is a finite number. As such it is correct to say that computers struggle if the number of digits is too large. While for practical uses modern computers don’t struggle with finite integers one normally encounters they do struggle with precision in certain circumstances. For 3rd graders I think it’s OK to introduce them to the concept that computers, like all devices, have limitations.
> A computer can’t display more digits than the number of particles in the observable universe. This is a finite number. As such it is correct to say that computers struggle if the number of digits is too large
There are two sources of error here:
1. Your interpretation is essentially "computers struggle to complete tasks that are impossible for them to complete" - a meaningless tautology. At best it is "nothing scales infinitely" which perhaps is a bit more useful as a refutation for complaints that something "doesn't scale" in an unlimited fashion, but that doesn't seem to be the context here.
2. "Too large" is ambiguous. If it's "too large for computers to handle" then it devolves into the above meaningless tautology. However, a sensible and common interpretation would be to interpret "if <something> is too large" as "if <something> is very large" - but we know that computers can in fact handle numbers with huge digit counts (somewhere between 1 and 60+ million.)
So the original statement is either a largely meaningless tautology or something that is misleading and/or incorrect. PP's criticism is valid.
It’s not an ad hominem. It’s a polite way to suggest that you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to teaching concepts to kids. I think it’s worth your while to wonder why it is so obvious that you are not a teacher. What experience and insights regarding age appropriate explanations are you missing that make it so obvious that you don’t teach?
Correctness, of the sort you are implying are absolutely not appropriate at all levels. There’s a reason kids in second grade are told that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller one, for instance.
1. None of what you are saying removes the ad hominem aspect.
2. In grades 1-2 (iirc) we applied negative numbers when we talked about the number line (which we had on the wall.) Even preschoolers knew about negative temperatures on the thermometer.
Just like that language self-study tool that was on the front page recently, an ML based math tutor is one of the things that are much easier to imagine and to hype than to actually make work well.
I just don't trust companies that try to give the impression that they've worked it out already - and this one seems even worse at that than the language thing.
What a good day for me! What a splendid learning experience! So glad I've clicked this link on HN today.
I am not a coder yet, but always wanna learn it, and indeed self learning elementory level math now. I felt I was so stupid when I tried to read even very basic CS materials, watch Youtube videos, I was very struggle with very basic things, also have no consistent time, then stopped many times, so now I start to learn basic math again, then consider the CS50/Youtube/CS books -->coding/game engine this routine.
I finished the demo, I never experienced such a good interractive learning way before, and thrilled want to tell everyone whom want to learn things a great tool like this exists.
Now I know, there are great tools like this one, learning thing is not necessarily borning and hard, it can be easy and smoothing, and a nice enjoy.
I hope guys/gals can make more tools like this.
PS: "timed out for waiting speech" is a bit annoying in Chrome, maybe I got slow internet? Also, the voice is robotic, maybe use a more lively sound would be better?
I can't wait for next lessons, I want to learn things like this way!!
The biggest part of a classroom is behavior management so I imagine this will not be helpful. The kind of kid who’s motivated can simply use khan academy for free.
Good content is obviously important, but there are literally millions of teachers redundantly creating content every year. It's easy enough to create canonical good content, no AI needed.
I imagine this will be completely ineffective or even counterproductive to an unmotivated, poorly behaved child.
I did. A poorly behaved student would close the page. How are you going to stop that? Real children don't pay attention in the classroom.
Personally I found the demo kind of cringe - why the drake meme? Computers do not "struggle with too many digits" why use a metaphor that's just wrong?
With the "1 to 2 Machine" Demo the only feedback you get on no action is "green box is looking a bit empty." Not engaging really.
I think this would be useful for a motivated kid, but in that case Khan Academy already has way more content and is free. Don't see why you'd pay $50/month. That's to say nothing of YouTube which has even more content than Khan Academy, and is again free (or $15 if you don't want the ads).
Finally, I don't really see the "AI" here. The demo as constructed is basically a Google Slide deck with some JavaScript sprinkled in. A true "AI" experience would be that you, at any moment can ask for help and contextually it would help you. So in the case I described earlier it might go back and redisplay with arrows, or perhaps make the colors even more obvious.
It's pretty clear the person in question has spent time with children. I did the demo. I have children. I thought the same thing, ie "good luck getting more than 5% of kids to follow this".
I entered incorrect values many times in the demo and it just proceeded with the pre-programmed lesson. The lesson seems quite linear, with no substantial opportunity to return to reteach principles that are greatly misunderstood.
A real tutor would actively assess the points of misunderstanding and develop new strategies for helping the learner understand. This tutor mostly seems interested in moving the learner to the next step of the lesson.
This is madness. I'm trying the demo and it is completely incomprehensible to me. This would have been incredibly frustrating to me as a child -- I would want them to stop speaking in metaphors and tell me what the fuck they were trying to teach me. Since then I have acquired a scientific PhD and taught myself undergrad computer science and math, and I do not understand this lesson.
Really? I'm not too knowledgable about 8-yr olds and I'm certainly not telling you what to do with yours, but if you were to get them to explain what they learned about the binary counting system you feel that it would make sense and reveal that some underlying concepts were genuinely understood?
You can see my other comment on here, but hours after the demo I asked my 8yo to explain binary to my wife. He explained how 101 in binary is 5 pretty well.
That's fair and I don't blame you for being suspicious of my testimonial. I built the widget that's used in the demo. My son didn't play with it until the entire demo lesson was complete. He liked the lesson and learned binary from it -- something we hadn't taught him elsewhere. He asked to do it again on another day. He then went on and did two of our other unreleased lessons on his own and enjoyed them. As a parent and as someone who helped build this, I was excited.
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.
Eh, its a lot easier to question a machine that isn't also defending its ego. Kids are quick to spot and question a contradiction until that behavior is socialized away - an LLM doesnt get impatient when you ask a bunch of questions, or dismiss you because it thinks the question is dumb.
Sure, an LLM based tool may happily double down on a wrong position, and articulately address a student's concerns in doing so, possibly hallucinating convincing evidence.
I think we have to just really drill into our minds that, as convincing as these tools are, sometimes they are flat out lying/mistaken/misinformed. If we treat them like our know-it-all friend who is sometimes just a big bullshitter, and take everything with a pinch of salt, then these can be extremely useful tools for learning the big picture if not the specifics.
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.
More generally, we should be skeptical of all new information we learn. What makes someone more trustworthy than an LLM? For science we need experiments, theories, mechanisms, etc. For history we need sources, ideally primary, and working from there. For math we need proofs.
Knowledge is much more fallible than many appreciate. Many of the “universal” truths of today were once unknown or controversial. Our understanding of the world is built on a giant set of shoulders, of all those who have come before us. We do ourselves a great disservice not to acknowledge, understand, and appreciate how something came to be “true”.
I’m not implying teachers are uneducated, but rather that it’s important to understand why what they are teaching is accepted. For instance, creationism used to be taught in public schools, we used to not believe germs to be the cause of illness, etc. What we teach is a reflection of what we “know”, but what we know isn’t always true.
Exactly - people want these to be infallible. I say stupid stuff literally constantly and I'm a grown adult. Teachers are incredibly fallible - but someone schooled in math can still do a ton of good.
"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 book!