Will AI deliver a Maths tutor to every child?

Last year saw the release of a landmark video on the OpenAI YouTube feed. It dropped with little fanfare, but its significance was not lost on those of us working in Maths education.

The short clip shows Sal Khan (of Khan Academy) and his son, Imran, using GPT-4 as a Maths tutor to coach Imran through a Pythagoras’ Theorem question. The step-change in innovation is the quality of the interaction: drawing on Imran’s voice cues as well as his workings on screen, the AI tutor prompts and praises him through to successful completion of the question, in the manner of any good Maths teacher.

This new ‘flagship model’ is heralded by OpenAI for its game-changing functionality ‘to reason across audio, vision, and text in real time’, thus bringing the prospect of a Math tutor for every child closer than ever before. The proud parent in the video, Khan, is clearly not only proud of his son’s mathematics skills, but of the implications to edtech like KhanAcademy. Khan’s lucrative partnership with Microsoft has seen their product accelerate from a bank of online videos to the launch of ‘Khanmigo’, a more comprehensive AI offer for teachers, learners and parents. 

However, there are still barriers to overcome before we see this kind of AI rolled out to learners across the globe. For example, the kind of stylus and touch-screen technology used with ease by Imran is far from available to all students in the UK, never mind in the less-developed countries that Gates and Khan wish to reach. Furthermore, the physical presence and regularity of the traditional tutor is a key element to making 1-1 support work: there is a reason why parents pay for the motivating regularity of a personal tutor rather than sitting their child at a screen and expecting them to get on with their Pythagoras practice questions. The fact that we see Sal sitting alongside his son in the video is telling - would all parents be motivated enough to do this?

Perhaps we will see this kind of student support rolled out in a classroom (rather than home) setting: there, technology can be available and regulated; the teacher can act as a ‘guide on the side’; and even a non-specialist can keep students on task and motivated. While the AI may well master quality ‘instruction’, the bigger challenge is the holy grail of psychological motivation, especially in a world with so many other avenues for dopamine boosts on-screen.

In brief, while we will certainly see further (impressive) disruption in edu-AI in the coming years, I’m not expecting Maths teachers to lose their jobs any time soon.

References

Sal Khan Youtube clip - Math problems with GPT-4o (youtube.com)