How about an AI math tutor that looks at paper and pencil?

The New York Times, which told us that closing schools for 18 months was the absolute best thing for children (keep them safe from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82), now tells us that screens are bad… “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education”:

Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.

Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.

In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves — picture being a teenager in math class trying to concentrate on sine and cosine while sitting behind that display of flesh. It is disturbing on a number of levels.

(Teenagers are spending 80 percent of their in-class time watching porn and then just wasting the rest of the school day?)

Based on looking over the shoulders of our 4th and 6th graders, electronic math homework is the worst idea that I’ve seen. Each problem is multiple choice. The child can click on A. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then click on B. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then select C. The software says “Right” and proceeds to the next problem. Neither teacher nor parent is notified that the homework was apparently completed via guessing. Then the test comes along and the child who got 100% on homework might receive a grade of 25-40% because the test doesn’t allow for correction of wrong guesses.

What if an AI could work like a human math tutor? My dream is a household with cameras everywhere so that an artificial intelligence can tell me where to find scissors, tape, the coffee cup that I set down 15 minutes ago, etc. (see Why doesn’t ChatGPT tell us where to find items in our houses?). Given those already-installed cameras, an AI can watch a young scholar working on pencil and paper and say “That answer isn’t quite right”, then explain where the child went off track.

Optional enhancement: eye-safe laser pointer on a gimbal so that the robot can point to a place on the physical page while talking about what went wrong and what the learner should do.

The closest existing product to the above is Photomath, I think. You can give it a handwritten math problem and it explains how to solve it. I don’t think that is what most learners need, though. They already sat through the teacher telling them how to solve the same kind of problem (maybe while simultaneously streaming porn?). Also, instead of getting kids off the screen it forces kids onto the screen to use Photomath. The above-described system would be 100 percent audio-based from the learner’s point of view.

Should this be called “MathGPT”? Of course that name is already taken. The product seems to be a way to get learners to spend more time on screens: