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It's just a LOT of work to tailor the lesson plan for 30 students, rather than one. A really really good tutor will customize the day's lesson every day for th

It's just a LOT of work to tailor the lesson plan for 30 students, rather than one. A really really good tutor will customize the day's lesson every day for the child. This is famously envisioned as one of the areas that AI might help with: bringing 1:1 tutoring to the poorest of the world's children. It's the key plot hook of Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", wherein said Primer is an AI-powered tablet computer designed to interactively tutor young orphans and other street children to become highly educated.

teucris 4y ago
While I loved the idea of the Primer, I think one of the themes of the book was that it actually couldn’t work fully with just AI. All the children who end up “exceptional” (eg not just part of the mouse army) actually had a human tutor behind the scenes.
- upwardbound 4y ago
  Agreed. I guess that's one gap between the rich and the poorest that will always be hard to bridge. If we could adapt some concepts to helping kids thru a government program, it could still be pretty cool to think about allocating even a small % of what we spend on military procurement to maybe go into giving AI tablets to every child that taught the most basic stuff like healthy diet, keeping a personal budget, how to learn about elections and vote in them, etc., and give the kids access to creator tools too in a way where it's in the Start Menu or whatever but not forced upon them. That way maybe most kids just mostly play games, and do a few mandatory lessons about diet & how to vote, but the kids who are self-motivated and driven to explore can open up stuff like Unity, Roblox, Blender, Visual Studio Code, and more. And these kids who live w/ five siblings in crammed in a Projects apartment the size of a large closet, can still express their genius thru the tool of computing. I hope it could maybe be a pretty inspiring huge improvement in the lives of a lot of kids who deserve better. I think the hardest part about doing this in real life is that in the book the Primer's hardware is always speedy & cutting-edge but in real life a tablet computer that's more than 2-3 years old feels obsolete, and I don't want kids that have the government-issued tablets from when they were little to have to carry that as a mark of shame. For a very literal real-world example, there was the One Laptop Per Child project. There are a lot of critiques of it but let's focus on the core of what they did which was give free laptops to impoverished children in the Global South. The laptops were quite well-designed (I did an EE tear-down of their first version laptop as a university EE project, and came away impressed). Parts of the schematic and architecture are almost on the level of something from Woz. But it's hard to imagine how children given the equivalent of a netbook will be able to keep up with other kids as the world moves on to VR/AR etc and these children are left behind, with no way to run Roblox or anything the cool kids are doing. I'd definitely suggest though that you read about the project, which is still ongoing in some form a number of years later. It's really interesting and the closest thing there is right now to the Primer. Maybe you could lend your ideas to them or help with open source if educational technology is one of your passions, as it is mine and as it seems to be yours. https://laptop.org/ https://laptop.org/ Best wishes in your research & endeavors!
  - teucris 4y ago
    We don’t need hardware to make this possible. We need very well designed content - lessons and software - to drive equity in education. The web can do the rest. Every day more and more of the world gets connected to the web - the screen they use to access doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s just a door to the content.
barry-cotter 4y ago
> It's just a LOT of work to tailor the lesson plan for 30 students, rather than one. Why bother? If they get it they can advance to the next lesson/unit/certification. If they don’t get out keep working individually or in a group with others of the same level, with the help of a teacher or a more advanced student. That’s how the monitorial[1] system worked. If you group by ability without regard to age the “need” to differentiate vanishes in a puff of smoke. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/monitorial-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/monitorial-system
- upwardbound 4y ago
  Ah interesting... that's a very good point! Then why aren't these programs rolled out all over the US and stuff in public schools? Is it just an example of government incompetence? Are there any younger public administrators seeking to fix the administration or whatever? Sorry I don't know much about this yet but it sounds very promising.

teucris 4y ago

While I loved the idea of the Primer, I think one of the themes of the book was that it actually couldn’t work fully with just AI. All the children who end up “exceptional” (eg not just part of the mouse army) actually had a human tutor behind the scenes.

upwardbound 4y ago
Agreed. I guess that's one gap between the rich and the poorest that will always be hard to bridge. If we could adapt some concepts to helping kids thru a government program, it could still be pretty cool to think about allocating even a small % of what we spend on military procurement to maybe go into giving AI tablets to every child that taught the most basic stuff like healthy diet, keeping a personal budget, how to learn about elections and vote in them, etc., and give the kids access to creator tools too in a way where it's in the Start Menu or whatever but not forced upon them. That way maybe most kids just mostly play games, and do a few mandatory lessons about diet & how to vote, but the kids who are self-motivated and driven to explore can open up stuff like Unity, Roblox, Blender, Visual Studio Code, and more. And these kids who live w/ five siblings in crammed in a Projects apartment the size of a large closet, can still express their genius thru the tool of computing. I hope it could maybe be a pretty inspiring huge improvement in the lives of a lot of kids who deserve better. I think the hardest part about doing this in real life is that in the book the Primer's hardware is always speedy & cutting-edge but in real life a tablet computer that's more than 2-3 years old feels obsolete, and I don't want kids that have the government-issued tablets from when they were little to have to carry that as a mark of shame. For a very literal real-world example, there was the One Laptop Per Child project. There are a lot of critiques of it but let's focus on the core of what they did which was give free laptops to impoverished children in the Global South. The laptops were quite well-designed (I did an EE tear-down of their first version laptop as a university EE project, and came away impressed). Parts of the schematic and architecture are almost on the level of something from Woz. But it's hard to imagine how children given the equivalent of a netbook will be able to keep up with other kids as the world moves on to VR/AR etc and these children are left behind, with no way to run Roblox or anything the cool kids are doing. I'd definitely suggest though that you read about the project, which is still ongoing in some form a number of years later. It's really interesting and the closest thing there is right now to the Primer. Maybe you could lend your ideas to them or help with open source if educational technology is one of your passions, as it is mine and as it seems to be yours. https://laptop.org/ https://laptop.org/ Best wishes in your research & endeavors!
- teucris 4y ago
  We don’t need hardware to make this possible. We need very well designed content - lessons and software - to drive equity in education. The web can do the rest. Every day more and more of the world gets connected to the web - the screen they use to access doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s just a door to the content.

barry-cotter 4y ago

> It's just a LOT of work to tailor the lesson plan for 30 students, rather than one. Why bother? If they get it they can advance to the next lesson/unit/certification. If they don’t get out keep working individually or in a group with others of the same level, with the help of a teacher or a more advanced student. That’s how the monitorial[1] system worked. If you group by ability without regard to age the “need” to differentiate vanishes in a puff of smoke. [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/monitorial-system https://www.britannica.com/topic/monitorial-system

upwardbound 4y ago
Ah interesting... that's a very good point! Then why aren't these programs rolled out all over the US and stuff in public schools? Is it just an example of government incompetence? Are there any younger public administrators seeking to fix the administration or whatever? Sorry I don't know much about this yet but it sounds very promising.