In classrooms, teachers put artificial intelligence tutoring bots to test

On a recent morning, Cheryl Drakeford, a third-grade teacher at First Avenue Elementary School in Newark, projected a challenging math question on her classroom’s whiteboard: “What fraction of the letters in the word MATHEMATICIAN are consonants?”

Drakeford knew that “consonant” might be an unfamiliar word to some students. So she suggested they ask Khanmigo, a new tutoring bot that uses artificial intelligence (AI), for help.

She paused for a minute while about 15 schoolchildren dutifully typed the same question — “What are consonants?” — into their math software. Then she asked the third-graders to share the tutoring bot’s answer.

Tech industry hype and doomsday prophesies around AI-enhanced chatbots like ChatGPT sent many schools scrambling this year to block or limit the use of the tools in classrooms. 

Newark Public Schools is taking a different approach. It is one of the first school systems in the US to pilot test Khanmigo, an automated teaching aid developed by Khan Academy, an education nonprofit whose online lessons are used by hundreds of districts.

“Consonants are the letters in the alphabet that are not vowels,” one student read aloud. “The vowels are A, E, I, O and U. Consonants are all the other letters.”