Comment by bheadmaster
18 hours ago
This is actually a great way to foster the learning spirit in the age of AI. Even if the student uses AI to arrive at an answer, they will still need to, at the very least, ask the AI to give it an explanation that will teach them how it arrived to the solution.
No this is not the way we want learning to be - just like how students are banned from using calculators until they have mastered the foundational thinking.
There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths. It is certainly not obvious to me that calculators will have a negative effect - I certainly always allowed my kids to use them.
LLMs are trickier and use needs to be restricted to stop cheating, just as my kids had restrictions on what calculators they could use in some exams. That does not mean they are all bad or even net bad if used correctly.
Please share what you know. My search found a heap of opinions and just one study where use of calculators made children less able to calculate by themselves, not the ability to learn and understand math in general.
That's a fair point, but AI can do much more than just provide you with an answer like a calculator.
AI can explain the underlying process of manual computation and help you learn it. You can ask it questions when you're confused, and it will keep explaining no matter how off the topic you go.
We don't consider tutoring bad for learning - quite the contrary, we tutor slower students to help them catch up, and advanced students to help them fulfill their potential.
If we use AI as if it was an automated, tireless tutor, it may change learning for the better. Not like it was anywhere near great as it was.
You're assuming the students are reading any of this. They're not, they're just copy/pasting it.
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Calculator don't tell you step by step. AI can.
Symbolic computation is a thing. How do you think wolfram alpha worked for 20 years before AI?
And it’s making that up as well.
Yeah; it gets steps 1-3 right, 4-6 obviously wrong, and then 7-9 subtly wrong such that a student, who needs it step by step while learning, can't tell.