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Synthesis Tutor – Math tutor for children
- ClintFix 3y agoI had the opportunity to work on this. I let my son try the demo last week. Hours afterward at dinner I asked him to explain binary to my wife. "Mom, imagine you have the number 101 in binary. The first 1 is the fours spot, so you have 4. There's none in the twos spot. and 1 in the ones spot. So that means you have 5." Two days later he came into my office and asked if he could do more tutor. That's a huge win in my book!
- symic 3y agoI’ve taught math at the college level for 25 years. The video looked impressive. Do you know up to what level of math it does?
- avhon1 3y agoFurther down the page, they have a "Curriculum roadmap", which goes up to things like "College Algebra" and "Matrix Theory".
- rahimnathwani 3y agoIf you're looking for stuff at high school or college level, check out mathacademy.com (No affiliation - just a happy customer.)
- slackerIII 3y agoHow does that compare to Khan Academy?
- rahimnathwani 3y agoHow it's similar: - focused on mastery - good treatment of math How it's different: - doesn't cover elementary school topics - lessons are text, not video - paid, not free - lessons are presented based on what you already know (e.g. you can't choose to study a topic before you've demonstrated mastery of all topics it depends on) - I pick the next lesson from a very small set (usually 5 options, sometimes fewer), so there's no wasting time choosing what to study next - really great spaced repetition system that prevents forgetting
- symic 3y agoThanks for the head’s up.
- poorbutdebtfree 3y ago$50/month is pretty steep for what looks like a Khan clone.
- 2snakes 3y agoIt is accredited though. College credit?
- aoki 3y agoThey don't grant degrees or diplomas. As such it is presumably accredited as a Supplementary Education Program and (like JHU CTY, Stanford ULO, and AoPS) do not grant credit. Such programs can be the basis of credits if your "real" high school accepts them, though.
- 2snakes 3y agoRight, ymmv for transfers at either a hs or college. But the accredited status makes it possible to get approval. MA say they can make the documentation available manually and will automatically in the future.
- ClintFix 3y agoWe plan on having math through age 10 by the end of the year
- gnicholas 3y agoHow does this compare to Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI chatbot?
- ClintFix 3y agoIt has manipulatives/widgets that the tutor works with and responds to, rather than just a chat bot.
- sytelus 3y agoI don’t see anything functional here. Is waiting list announcement all it takes to get on front page these days?
- gnicholas 3y agoThere's a short demo you can try. It doesn't work on mobile though.
- vintermann 3y agoJust like that language self-study tool that was on the front page recently, an ML based math tutor is one of the things that are much easier to imagine and to hype than to actually make work well. I just don't trust companies that try to give the impression that they've worked it out already - and this one seems even worse at that than the language thing.
- barrenko 3y agoCould you please post what the app for languages was, can't seem to find it.
- rokkitmensch 3y agogiglish
- barrenko 3y agoThanks, there was at least one other :).
- yding 3y agoCool! Would love to beta test with my 10 year old.
- light_hue_1 3y agoI tried the demo. As an educator who has taught math: this is frustrating junk. It moves at a crawl. It doesn't explain the reasoning for anything. It provides no motivation. It's full of incorrect statements like "Computers struggle with too many digits." Pretty much the worst practice if you want to teach someone anything.
- symic 3y agoIn third grade parlance it is correct to say computers struggle with too many digits.
- mywittyname 3y agoThey don't "struggle". Computers exhibit definite behavior when a program attempts to store or operate on numbers that are too large for the allocated space. For integers, overflow behavior is pretty easy to understand.
- symic 3y agoObviously I know this. As stated, in 3rd grade parlance it’s appropriate to say “they struggle”. Have you ever heard someone say, “I need a new computer; mine’s dying.”? This level of pedantic nitpicking is not appropriate for 3rd graders. I’ve heard professional programmers say that their computer struggles with compiling certain programs they are working on. Colloquialisms can be useful and they are ubiquitous.
- musicale 3y agoIt would be more accurate to say that calculating with very large integers or integer fractions with millions of digits can be slow on current computers - but it's still far beyond what humans can typically do without assistance. Million-digit numbers are absurdly large in terms of physical quantities, but can easily arise when one is enumerating possibilities, such as the number of ways that one could give out randomized phone numbers to everyone in a city. (That's the sort of explanation that my mathematically-inclined friends and I would have understood in grades 3-5, when we learned about integers, rational and irrational numbers, and basic probability/combinatorics, as well as simple algorithms for multi-digit arithmetic and conversion between integer and decimal fractions.) Factorial and exponential functions were (and are) fun to play with on calculators because of the large numbers you can generate; python and mathematica are even more fun of course. I think recent TI and Casio graphing calculators support python, though I don't know about their bignum support or memory limits.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoI think the impact of LLMs for education is REALLY underappreciated. You don't need AGI, just local repetition, with some interactivity. Your average science teacher knows a lot about a lot, but not a ton about anything. That's perfect for one-on-one LLM tutoring
- acomjean 3y agoI get that people want this. The issue is that these things go off the rails sometimes. Without any supervision and as an “educational” resource it will be unquestioned and in front of people who don’t know enough to question it.
- elevaet 3y agoI think we have to just really drill into our minds that, as convincing as these tools are, sometimes they are flat out lying/mistaken/misinformed. If we treat them like our know-it-all friend who is sometimes just a big bullshitter, and take everything with a pinch of salt, then these can be extremely useful tools for learning the big picture if not the specifics. Now, is it reasonable to expect children to be skeptical about everything the AI tutor is telling them? Probably not? Maybe? We've all had human teachers make mistakes or bullshit, maybe we can accept some fallibility in these LLMs too.
- lumb63 3y agoMore generally, we should be skeptical of all new information we learn. What makes someone more trustworthy than an LLM? For science we need experiments, theories, mechanisms, etc. For history we need sources, ideally primary, and working from there. For math we need proofs. Knowledge is much more fallible than many appreciate. Many of the “universal” truths of today were once unknown or controversial. Our understanding of the world is built on a giant set of shoulders, of all those who have come before us. We do ourselves a great disservice not to acknowledge, understand, and appreciate how something came to be “true”.
- 3y ago
- pimlottc 3y agoIf you're pushing a personal education tool that uses AI, you'd better explain exactly how AI is used before I'm going to put it in front of a child.
- brennancolberg 3y agoNo user ever sees live/unchecked LLM output, if that's what you're concerned about :-) (- the core infrastructure engineer on this project)
- pimlottc 3y agoGood to know; that info should be on the page!
- zinclozenge 3y agoI can't wait until this tech progresses to the point it can reliably tutor for more advanced courses like real analysis, group theory, linear algebra, etc. I actually wondered if it would be feasible to use NLP techniques to check user submitted answers to proof based problem, LLMs might be get there.
- da39a3ee 3y agoThis is madness. I'm trying the demo and it is completely incomprehensible to me. This would have been incredibly frustrating to me as a child -- I would want them to stop speaking in metaphors and tell me what the fuck they were trying to teach me. Since then I have acquired a scientific PhD and taught myself undergrad computer science and math, and I do not understand this lesson.
- ClintFix 3y agoWeird because my 8yo understood it and loved it
- da39a3ee 3y agoReally? I'm not too knowledgable about 8-yr olds and I'm certainly not telling you what to do with yours, but if you were to get them to explain what they learned about the binary counting system you feel that it would make sense and reveal that some underlying concepts were genuinely understood?
- ClintFix 3y agoYou can see my other comment on here, but hours after the demo I asked my 8yo to explain binary to my wife. He explained how 101 in binary is 5 pretty well.
- throwaway675309 3y agoForgive me for being naturally suspicious but I would prefer a breathless testimonial from somebody who wasn't affiliated with the project.
- ClintFix 3y agoThat's fair and I don't blame you for being suspicious of my testimonial. I built the widget that's used in the demo. My son didn't play with it until the entire demo lesson was complete. He liked the lesson and learned binary from it -- something we hadn't taught him elsewhere. He asked to do it again on another day. He then went on and did two of our other unreleased lessons on his own and enjoyed them. As a parent and as someone who helped build this, I was excited.
- endisneigh 3y agoThe biggest part of a classroom is behavior management so I imagine this will not be helpful. The kind of kid who’s motivated can simply use khan academy for free. Good content is obviously important, but there are literally millions of teachers redundantly creating content every year. It's easy enough to create canonical good content, no AI needed. I imagine this will be completely ineffective or even counterproductive to an unmotivated, poorly behaved child.
- ClintFix 3y agoIt's pretty clear you didn't actually try the demo before writing this...
- endisneigh 3y agoI did. A poorly behaved student would close the page. How are you going to stop that? Real children don't pay attention in the classroom. Personally I found the demo kind of cringe - why the drake meme? Computers do not "struggle with too many digits" why use a metaphor that's just wrong? With the "1 to 2 Machine" Demo the only feedback you get on no action is "green box is looking a bit empty." Not engaging really. I think this would be useful for a motivated kid, but in that case Khan Academy already has way more content and is free. Don't see why you'd pay $50/month. That's to say nothing of YouTube which has even more content than Khan Academy, and is again free (or $15 if you don't want the ads). Finally, I don't really see the "AI" here. The demo as constructed is basically a Google Slide deck with some JavaScript sprinkled in. A true "AI" experience would be that you, at any moment can ask for help and contextually it would help you. So in the case I described earlier it might go back and redisplay with arrows, or perhaps make the colors even more obvious.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoIt's pretty clear the person in question has spent time with children. I did the demo. I have children. I thought the same thing, ie "good luck getting more than 5% of kids to follow this".
- stainablesteel 3y agothe demo would be nicer if you could skip the speech, for those who would prefer. i couldn't finish because it was slowing me down so much. its a solid basis, i'm excited for all the topics they say they're covering
- ClintFix 3y agoIn the regular, non-demo lessons the speech can be toggled on/off and the speed can be adjusted.
- jimmar 3y agoI entered incorrect values many times in the demo and it just proceeded with the pre-programmed lesson. The lesson seems quite linear, with no substantial opportunity to return to reteach principles that are greatly misunderstood. A real tutor would actively assess the points of misunderstanding and develop new strategies for helping the learner understand. This tutor mostly seems interested in moving the learner to the next step of the lesson.
- terrycody 3y agoWhat a good day for me! What a splendid learning experience! So glad I've clicked this link on HN today. I am not a coder yet, but always wanna learn it, and indeed self learning elementory level math now. I felt I was so stupid when I tried to read even very basic CS materials, watch Youtube videos, I was very struggle with very basic things, also have no consistent time, then stopped many times, so now I start to learn basic math again, then consider the CS50/Youtube/CS books -->coding/game engine this routine. I finished the demo, I never experienced such a good interractive learning way before, and thrilled want to tell everyone whom want to learn things a great tool like this exists. Now I know, there are great tools like this one, learning thing is not necessarily borning and hard, it can be easy and smoothing, and a nice enjoy. I hope guys/gals can make more tools like this. PS: "timed out for waiting speech" is a bit annoying in Chrome, maybe I got slow internet? Also, the voice is robotic, maybe use a more lively sound would be better? I can't wait for next lessons, I want to learn things like this way!!