I'm a former physics teacher, and while I'm impressed by the technology, I think this is a low efficacy innovation.
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
Imnimo · 9m ago
I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include:
"a list can be used for a recipe"
"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"
"a map can be used for a cookbook"
"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"
"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"
Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.
apwell23 · 5m ago
yea this is stupid . agreed.
I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem.
existing material is clear enough to learn from.
anonfunction · 32m ago
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions.
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
clusterhacks · 3m ago
Isn't this just showing the effects of actively engaging the learner by placing a topic in contexts familiar/favored by learner versus just reading about a topic?
Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?
I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.
yorwba · 9m ago
Figure 10 of the technical report https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ai_augmented_textb... has a third n=30 group labeled "LCG" that is mentioned nowhere else. It scores 100% on "I felt like today's educational tool helped me gain a good understanding of the content." so I wonder what's up with that.
lagniappe · 43m ago
Looking forward to my copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" a la Diamond Age
Animats · 37m ago
How much of this is cutesy animations and how much is really valuable?
devmor · 21m ago
This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid.
The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.
I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
I feel like this is thinking too small. I don’t want a better textbook. I want them to be basing this off of the experience of going to the most effective private tutors.
mclau157 · 26m ago
Google Veo 3 could also do a lot to spark interest by making 3D environments of Rome or Medieval Europe
stogot · 31m ago
Doesn’t work on mobile when you click into one of the examples. It says it is best for wide layouts
spwa4 · 21m ago
I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with:
1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)
2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)
3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)
Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
doctorpangloss · 22m ago
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it?
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...
ares623 · 16m ago
You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!
The real challenge in teaching Newton's laws of motion to teenagers is that they struggle to deal with the idea that friction isn't always there. When students enter the classroom, they arrive with an understanding of motion that they've intuited from watching things move all their lives, and that understanding is the theory of impetus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus
An AI system that can interrogate individual students' understanding of the ideas presented and pose questions that challenge the theory of impetus would be really useful, because 'unteaching' impetus theory to thirty students at once is extremely difficult. However, what Google has presented here, with slides and multiple guess quizzes, is just a variation on the 'chalk and talk' theme.
The final straw that made me leave teaching was the head of languages telling me that a good teacher can teach any subject. Discussions about 'the best pedagogy' never make any consideration of what is being taught; there's an implicit assumption that every idea and subject should be taught the same way. School systems have improved markedly since they were introduced in the nineteenth century, but I think we've got everything we can out of the subject-agnostic approach to improvement, and we need to start engaging with the detail of what's being taught to further improve.
"a list can be used for a recipe"
"a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals"
"a map can be used for a cookbook"
"a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen"
"a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together"
Maybe I'm over-estimating the taste of 7th graders, but I feel like I would get sick of this really quickly.
I don't know when these dorks will understand that education isn't a technical problem. Its a social and emotional problem.
existing material is clear enough to learn from.
It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper.
The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env var if you run it locally.
1. https://asxiv.org
2. https://asxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762
3. https://github.com/montanaflynn/asxiv
Like, if you had made the text pdf readers do some manual thinking by working on trying to place the topic into the same type of familiar/favored context, wouldn't that have been the better comparison?
I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts) but I'm not excited by this particular study structure.
The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill.
I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not leave me thinking of a tool that would provide any benefit greater than just giving teachers more resources would.
Link to an example:
https://learnyourway.withgoogle.com/scopes/AOcKkhsL/slides-n...
1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish)
2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math)
3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad)
Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teachers won't (AND mostly can't, they just don't know their subject) help them make a lot of exercises.
EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why?
There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven experiences like Khan Academy and Scratch are universally liked. Why?
When you look at Scratch, which I know a lot about, one thing they never do is allege that it improves test scores. They never, ever evaluate it quantitatively like that. And yet it is beloved.
Khan Academy: it is falling into the same trap as e.g. the Snoo. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's about, who pays? Who is the customer? Khan Academy did a study that showed a thing. Kids are not choosing to watch educational YouTube videos because of a study. It is cozy learning.
But why does Khan Academy need studies for a test score thing? Why does Google? This is the problem with Ed Tech: the only model is to sell to districts, and when you sell to districts, you are doing Enterprise Sales. You can sometimes give them a thing that does something, but you are always giving them exactly what they ask for. Do you see the difference?
It doesn't matter if it's technology or if it is X or Y or Z: if the district asks for something that makes sense, great, and if it asks for something that doesn't make sense, or doesn't readily have the expertise to know what does and doesn't make sense, like with technology, tough cookie. Google will make something that doesn't make sense, if it feels that districts will adopt it.
We can go and try the merits of Learn Your Way, thankfully they provide a demo. All I'll say is, people have been saying, "more reading" is the answer, and there is a lot of fucking reading in this experience, but maybe the problem isn't that there isn't enough text to read. The problem is that kids do not want to read, so...