Even though I’ve been helping my students learn ethical ways to use AI in school to learn, I am finding that using AI Chatbots for Math is not yet where I would need it to be before I could recommend it to my students. Now I have not used Khanmigo, only Bing Chat and Wolfram Alpha so this recommendation is based on those two services.
I’ve been taking courses from Pam Harris’s Math Is Figureoutable and I am convinced that teaching kids how to figure out solutions instead of having them copy and memorize specific algorithms is the best way to go. I know from my personal Math learning journey, I could not figure Math out as well using the steps I have memorized so I only got so far in Math whereas understanding what I’m doing is proving much more helpful.
Here are some questions I asked Bing Chat taken right out of my 5th grade Bridges curriculum:
It just solved the problem for me. Not what I wanted and not being a good tutor!
So I asked Bing Chat how it multiplied 72 by $9, I was looking for it to show me some ways to solve it. Nope, not even close.
In the above prompt I tried being more specific in that I didn’t just want an answer, I wanted it to teach me how to solve the problem myself. Still not much help for students who are not yet proficient with double digit multiplication.
So in the above screenshot I asked directly for Bing Chat to teach me or show me. I was disappointed to see what it was teaching me to use the standard algorithm that we teach kids to memorize and mimic. It could have used an area model or shown me how I could have multiplied 70 X 9 then added the other 2 groups of 9. That’s what I was hoping for because those strategies are taught in the Bridges Math curriculum and those are two strategies I’m learning to teach to my students.
I tried a different question to see if multiplication was not the best type of Math problem to ask for help with. Again Bing Chat solved it for me but at least this time it gave me the steps it used. Not the best so I cannot recommend to my students to use Bing Chat if they get stuck in Math and I’m not available.
So I gave Wolfram Alpha a shot:
What the heck is that?! I certainly did NOT expect that from Wolfram Alpha! I was shocked and so disappointed.
So I tried asking the problem in a different way as shown above and no, no, no. Not good at all. Ugh.
I tried a more straightforward approach and at least this time Wolfram Alpha started to solve the problem. It used long division and that is not the strategy that I am showing my students because in my 33 years of teaching I can tell for certain that long division does not work for all students! Plus they do not know what they are doing or why they are doing it.
I gave the 25% of 60 problem a try and it was not helpful. Another Math site that does not work well as a tutor. Sure, it can solve Math problems and if that’s all we need, we will use it. For helping students learn the Math, it gets a big NO from me.
What did I do wrong? Are others out there getting better results for Math with Bing Chat or Wolfram Alpha, the only two tools I can use with my under 13 years of age students.
I found some AI tools that could work! Here’s a post I wrote about CodeBreaker’s Byte AI.
Here’s a post I wrote about DigCitInstitute’s Mundo AI and Mizou’s Chatbot Creator.
