Ignoring whether or not this is a good idea in the first place, what about inverting the loop? Have the robot drive the interaction.

Who would have thought?

I was among those who, when Khanmigo was first announced, were pretty excited about it's potential. I then waited for data on the results....and kept waiting.....and kept waiting. And now four years later this is apparently what we are going to get. I think that this is enough for me to decide that Khanmigo, regardless of whether or not a student actually engages with it, doesn't make much learning difference. At some point, the absence of (reported) data becomes data in itself.

I still believe, in principle, that AI tutors could be massively helpful for learning. But apparently we haven't yet figured out how to take that principle and turn it into reality.

> “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

In my interactions with my kids public school and their teachers, they're goal is ram content down their throat and test for retention, not foster an environment open to questions

Had a teacher claim straight up they don't believe the system works and are just in teaching for benefits and summer vacation

IMO Sal Khan's revolution hasn't happened because the adults in charge right now are ignorant and inept but incredibly vain nonetheless

It’s going to be quite hard to motivate students to learn now that they know answering can be automated.

That said I do think it's particularly hilarious that KA's strategy to students not wanting to use the product is to make the product more integral to the experience.

An AI-based education system should have embedded in it "I am here to teach this person Geometry. Here is a list of the topics to cover, with a breakdown of steps for each including an intro section, a study section, a test section, and the meta material to go along with it.

That would work.

Dear Lord, how is this any different from Microsoft sticking Copilot or Google sticking Gemini in every single offering? They're literally saying that people aren't using the chat bot enough so they're going to force it on people inside the product.

>Unlike other AI tools such as ChatGPT, Khanmigo doesn’t just give answers. Instead, with limitless patience, it guides learners to find the answer themselves. In addition, Khanmigo is the only AI tool that is incorporated with Khan Academy’s world-class content library that covers math, humanities, coding, social studies, and more.

The first differentiation is literally just prompting (if at all). Nowadays you can tell any chatbot to behave that way. The second one may have been an edge before tool use was widely common, but with all chatbots now having access to the internet and code execution, it seems like this has also become a dud. This product was a nice idea on paper, but the fast technical evolution of the field has largely left it in the dust.

The issue in my country is that you equate education with getting a safe job. 20 years ago, you needed a high-school degree in social science to get a government job. 10 years ago you needed a bachelor in social sciences to get the same job. 5 years ago you needed a bachelor in economy/engineering to get the same job. Now, because of recessions this is stretching to masters degrees.

You can't expect people who just want a job and a comfortable life and NEED to go to uni for this to want to be curious and want to learn.

The biggest thing is motivation. First off, if Khanmigo requires them to type and read everything, that's going to get tiring fast for most kids. But I don't know how you could do voice in a school setting - mine uses STT/TTS, but with 20 kids in a room, it'd be chaos - STT accuracy and diarization with 2 is already really challenging.

Motivation is helped a bit by following their interest, but it seems like they're having trouble guiding the kids when they prompt it that way. That was a pretty big issue with mine early on - the kids would talk to it for an hour about whatever topic they were interested in at the time, but it would never branch into something new.

The tutor I'm working on solves it by having a concept graph that covers a lot of learning, from the basics like math, dinosaurs, etc to other developmental topics like 6 year old boundary-pushing humor, and two LLM threads - one that handles the conversational turns, but another one in the background that strategizes and steers thet conversational thread by looking at the concept graph connections and considering how ready they are for each, and then injecting steering notes into the conversational thread. Basically system 1 and system 2 thinking. And after sessions, it'll make a basic plan of where to start next time, and what might be interesting to offer up.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I've been really pleasantly surprised at the quality of the tutoring, especially when it bridges into new topics - one of my sons is really into slay the spire, and it's used that as a launching-off point into probabilities, decision trees, python code of the algorithms he thinks about as he's facing different enemies, and general strategies on different facets, and my other son was really into sharks, which it bridged into extinct sharks like megalodon, how scientists derive how it looks given cartilage's lower propensity to fossilize, bridging to dinosaurs and their fossils, the K-PG extinction event, how food scarcity filtered for smaller animals like the ancestors of birds, and our small mammalian ancestors. And a whole bunch of other topics.

It's been pretty great in that way, but my biggest open question at the moment is how to get them to engage with it on their own on a more regular basis - they go to it occasionally for random questions, but to get good coverage of that huge knowledge graph would take much more. And fundamentally, I think that human engagement still just has a number of important aspects to it that it's lacking, and I'm not sure if it's possible to replace those well enough to make it so kids want to learn a significant portion of their knowledge this way. And it's in their playroom, and a lot of times, they'd just rather play with their magnatiles than talk to this thing about how things work.

That is a warning sign if ever there was one.

I still remember when Khan Academy first came out, there was talk that teachers would go obsolete because teaching would become centralized and delivered over video.

Khan Academy to me is still just a YouTube channel trying very hard to be something more.

  amazing in theory with the perfect user in the perfect use case,

  misused in practice with terrible consequences for society at large.

Who could have guessed.

AI is great for the curious. But its not yet there where it can proactively engage with students to generate interest.