AI and homework

I’ve seen a lot of discussions about the use of AI at school and the negative impact it can have on learning. Mostly, these were focused on the use of AI to get fed answers, or to correct homework, removing the need to think and learn of the pre-ai era.

However, as a parent developer, I’ve been using AI to gamify kids homework, helping them practice by generating more training scenarios and within a gamified environment.

I’ll point out that I’m still at the stage where my kids are too young to use AI themselves, being at elementary school, so I am not yet at the stage most problematic for its use.

The realization

My son has a binder with a daily list of exercises to complete: In first grade, this means learning to read and write simple words and doing basic maths. Each week, we get a new list of exercises, and they’re typically all of the same format. After watching my son struggle the first time he had to do subtractions and wanting to do more examples with him, I figured out I’d simply make a script to generate more examples dynamically. As I was lazy, I asked an AI to do it for me:

Generate an index.html page to pick a random number between 1 and 20, and perform a subtraction between this number and a random number between 1 and 5. The user will type in the answer, and the page will tell them if they’re correct or not. Increase the score each correct answer.

And it worked great!
I now could help my son practice until he received a correct number of answers, turning from a static problem to a mastery-based system where he needs to apply himself instead of rushing through the problem.

The progress

I’ve been using this technique to enhance the homework time since this first attempt.
Reading and spelling words, simple math problems, recognizing numbers, reading comprehension problems, math comprehension, and more!

As each homework category is a standalone html file, I have been hosting them and sharing them with other parents, and each week can contain new twists on the provided homework.

I’m sure khan academy and other services do have similar systems built-in, but using AI can yield tailored problems on demand for “free”.

Conclusion

With all of the negative aspects AI has had for education, it’s been enjoyable to find a simple, static use case for AI that is beneficial!