AI Will Teach Students—and Students Will Teach AI

Robot agents in the classroom will take Al learning far beyond today's chatbots

- By Edith Law

When most people picture AI in education, they imagine students using ChatGPT to do homework and write essays. But that’s only one facet of what this technology can do in the classroom. My work focuses on something different: having students learn by teaching AI agents.

The idea builds on a long-established maxim: that the true mark of expertise is being able to explain a subject clearly to someone else. In 2019, I developed Curiosity Notebook, a webbased platform where students could select a learning task and teach a robot. I ran a study during a four-week after-school program at an elementary school in the Waterloo, Ontario, area. Students broke off into small groups and read information about rocks, then taught their robot to classify them as metamorphic, sedimentary or igneous.

All this work predated the popular explosion of generative AI. Our system used simple, scripted dialogue. The robot would ask students questions to help it identify the rocks: does it have crystals? Does it have layers? Is it sparkly? The students could also direct the conversation and teach in their own way, rather than just responding to the robot’s questions.