I have been looking for tools that my students can use in class if they need help with Math. I’m especially hoping AI tools can help students when I am busy with another student or working with a small group of students and their peers are busy working on different tasks. Sometimes teammates are helpful and sometimes they are not so maybe an AI tool might be helpful. I especially think tools that can help guide students, like Khanmigo is supposed to do, without just giving answers would be great. Since Khanmigo costs money, a free AI tool that can do the job is perfect, especially for my 5th and 6th grade split class. With only one adult in there, me, teaching 5th grade Bridges to half the class while the 6th graders work independently on their Desmos curriculum then switching to teach the 6th their lesson while the 5th graders work independently means that students are working on their own without being able to call on me to help because I’m usually in the middle of direct instruction when they are practicing! Not ideal but necessary when you have a split class with two different curricula. And it’s not like I can teach 5th and 6th graders the same things all the time because their standards have some important differences.
When I can I find rich tasks that everyone can work on together or when I can offer mini-lessons like problem strings that I can have everyone working on at once, then I can teach the whole class at the same time. Yeah, that isn’t perfect either because I am still only able to help one student or one small team at any given time after the direct instruction. So even if I move quickly from student to student or team to team, some kids who get stuck are still waiting for help. And when the entire team is stuck, then they are all waiting for help until I’m free!
I tried Bing Chat and Wolfram Alpha myself first but both of those fell WAY short of my expectations. Then someone showed me CodeBreaker’s Byte AI and that one passed my test! I’ve recently learned about two more tools that I’ve been testing and I tried them to help kids learn Math, DigCitInstitute’s Mundo AI and Mizou’s Chatbot Creator. I wrote about those two in my last post where I tested them for writing feedback then I tested them for Math support.
Here is what I got from Mundo’s AI when asking it for help with a Bridges 5th grade Math question and a 6th grade Math problem:
Mundo fell short as did previous AI chatbots. Mundo just gave the answers with no prompting and no guiding students to problem solve themselves. Kids would have to prompt Mundo way too much to get the help they need and I don’t see kids ready to do that, especially with Maths they are just learning. And even when I asked Mundo to show me how to multiply, it went for the standard algorithm that causes many students problems because they can’t remember the steps. Trying to remember steps instead of learning how to figure out the problem is a poor way to learn Math. Mundo’s AI was not built/trained to guide students who need help learning Math.
So I went to Mizou again and this time I created a Chatbot from scratch with no generative support from the AI and here’s how it did:
It wasn’t perfect, I found the notations the Chatbot used to be extremely confusing, but it actually guided me through solving the problem myself! I would like to use this Chatbot so I will warn students about its use of strange notations and have them ask it for standard notations. I uploaded a pdf that I pieced together from one of Pam Harris’s Math Big Ideas documents and some documents with the 5th and 6th grade CCSS-Math standards and I don’t know how much that has come into play but when I use it with students I’ll see if my Chatbot will guide more and give students help the way I’m being trained to help students (the MathIsFigureOutAble way).
Again Mizou has climbed to the top of my list. I am looking forward to sharing this resource with my students and see if it can help them learn Math and maybe even become more independent learners in the process.
With Math I often show this video to my students and when they yell at the people to just walk, I ask them if that’s what some might think when seeing others looking at a Math problem like there’s no way they can solve it? I want students to see themselves as problem solvers and not helpless like the people stuck on the escalator. 🙂
