Sixth-grade students at Khan Lab School in Palo Alto, California are engaging in educational conversations with ‘Khanmigo,’ an AI chatbot tutor embedded within their math software.
As reported by the New York Times, the students faced questions that they didn’t immediately seek their teacher’s assistance for during their math lessons on quadratic equations, graphing functions, and Venn diagrams.
Instead, they utilized the text box available alongside their lessons to request help from Khanmigo, which offered step-by-step guidance and even offered congratulations upon successfully solving a problem.
Step into a classroom as a @nytimes reporter witnesses Khan Academy’s AI-powered tutor in action.👀🏫
Tools like Khanmigo “could usher in a profound shift in classroom teaching and learning,” said @natashanyt.https://t.co/05WVKvXHXn
— Khan Academy (@khanacademy)
The students at Khan Lab School are among the first in the United States to experience experimental conversational chatbots designed to replicate the experience of one-on-one human tutoring.
These tools employ sophisticated AI models, such as ChatGPT, enabling them to respond to students in a clear and coherent manner.
However, these automated tutoring systems, although promising, still face uncertainties. They may be susceptible to errors, facilitate cheating, diminish the role of teachers, or impede critical thinking, essentially transforming students into test subjects.
Khanmigo is part of a wave of new AI-powered educational tools developed by Khan Academy, a renowned nonprofit educational organization that has already assisted millions of students through its video tutorials.
Khanmigo has the potential to support teachers by streamlining tasks like lesson planning, enabling them to allocate more time to student interaction.
While hundreds of public schools have already incorporated Khan Academy’s online lessons in math and other subjects, the nonprofit organization plans to pilot-test the tutoring bot, Khanmigo, with districts, including Newark Public Schools in New Jersey.
The organization is currently assessing the effectiveness of Khanmigo and intends to make it widely available to districts starting this fall.
