CHATBOTS MIGHT DISRUPT MATH AND COMPUTER SCIENCE CLASSES.SOME TEACHERS SEE UPSIDES

For as long as Jake Price has been a teacher, Wolfram Alpha — a website that solves algebraic problems online — has threatened to make algebra homework obsolete.

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Teachers learned to work around and with it, said Price, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound. But now, they have a new homework helper to contend with: generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT.

Price doesn't see ChatGPT as a threat, and he's not alone. Some math professors believe artificial intelligence, when used correctly, could help strengthen math instruction. And it's arriving at a time when math scores are at a historic low and educators are questioning if math should be taught differently.

The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

Artificial intelligence can serve as a tutor, giving a student who is struggling with a problem immediate feedback. It can help a teacher plan math lessons, or write math problems geared toward different levels of instruction. It can show new computer programmers sample code, allowing them to skip over the chore of learning to write basic code.

As schools across the country debate banning AI chatbots, some math and computer science teachers are embracing them as just another tool.

“Math has always been evolving as technology evolves,” said Price. A hundred years ago, people were using slide rules and doing all of their multiplication with logarithmic tables. Then, along came calculators.