As long as Jake Price is a teacher, Tungsten Alpha – a website that solves algebraic problems online – has threatened to make algebra homework obsolete.
Teachers learned to work around it and with it, said Dr. Price, an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Puget Sound. But now they have a new homework helper to contend with: generative artificial intelligence tools, like ChatGPT.
Professor Price doesn’t see ChatGPT as a threat, and he’s not alone. Some math professors believe that AI, if used correctly, can help enhance math education. And it’s coming onto the scene at a time when math scores are at an all-time national low and teachers are interrogating if mathematics should be taught differently.
Why we wrote this
As schools across the country debate banning AI tools, some math and computer science teachers are embracing the change due to the nature of their field. This story is part of The Math Problem, the latest project from the newsrooms Collaboration in the field of education reporting.
AI can serve as a mentor, providing instant feedback to a student struggling with a problem. It can help a teacher plan math lessons, or write a variety of math problems aimed at different levels of instruction. It can even show new computer programmers sample code so they can skip the tedious chore of learning to write basic code.
Such as schools throughout the country debate on banning AI toolssome math and computer science teachers are embracing the change due to the nature of their field.
“Mathematics has always evolved as technology evolves,” says Dr. Price. A hundred years ago, people used slide rules and did all their multiplication with logarithmic tables. Then came calculators.
Dr. Price teaches with human-friendly technologies, ensuring students learn the skills in the classroom by hand. He then discusses with them the limitations of the technologies they might use when they get home.
“Computers are very good at doing annoying things,” he says. “We don’t have to do all those annoying things. We can let the computer do it. And then we can interpret the answer and think about what it tells us about the decisions we need to make.”
He wants his students to have fun looking for patterns, seeing how different methods can give different or the same answers, and how to translate those answers into decisions about the world.
“ChatGPT, like the calculator and like the slide rule and all the technology that came before it, helps us get to the heart of mathematics,” says Dr. Price.
Conversely, ChatGPT has its limits. It can show the right steps to solve a math problem – and then give the wrong answer.
This is because it “doesn’t really do the math,” says Dr. Price. It’s just putting together pieces of the sentences in which other people have described how to solve similar problems.
Min Sun, an education professor at the University of Washington, believes students should use ChatGPT as a personal tutor. If students get lost in the lesson and don’t understand a math operation, they can ask ChatGPT to explain it and provide some examples.
The Khan Academy, an educational nonprofit that offers a collection of online learning resources and videos and has long been the go-to place for math homework, has created just that.
The teacher is called Khanmigo. Students can open it while solving math problems and report when they get stuck.
They can have a conversation with the AI teacher and tell them what they don’t understand, and the AI teacher helps explain, says Kristen DiCerbo, the chief learning officer at Khan Academy.
“Instead of saying, ‘Here’s the answer for you,’ it says things like, ‘What’s next?’ or ‘What do you think is the next thing you can do?’” Ms. DiCerbo says.
Help for the math teacher
Dr. Sun, the UW education professor, wants teachers to use ChatGPT as their own assistant: to plan math lessons, give students good feedback and communicate with parents.
Teachers can ask AI, “What is the best way to teach this concept?” or “What are the types of mistakes students often make when learning this math concept?” Or, “What questions will students have about this concept?”
Teachers can also ask ChatGPT to recommend different levels of math problems for students who don’t have a good grasp of the concept, she says. This is especially helpful for teachers who are new to the profession or have students with diverse needs – special education or English language learners, says Dr. Sun.
“I’m amazed at the detail ChatGPT can sometimes provide,” she says. “It gives you some initial ideas and possible problem areas for students so I can better prepare myself before I walk into the classroom.”
And if a teacher already has a high-quality lesson plan, he or she can pass it on to ChatGPT and ask them to create another lesson in a similar teaching style, but for a different concept.
Dr. Sun hopes that ChatGPT can also help teachers write more culturally appropriate word problem questions so that all their students feel included.
“Today’s technology is basically a technical assistant that supports them, empowers them and strengthens their creative skills,” she says. “It’s really no substitute for their own freedom of choice, their own creativity, their own professionalism. They really have to take that into account.”
Help for the computer science teacher
If you asked Daniel Zingaro a year ago how he assesses his beginning computer science students, he said, “We ask them to write code.”
But if you asked him today, the answer would be much more complex, says Dr. Zingaro, an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
Professor Zingaro and Leo Porter, professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego, have written the book ‘Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT’. They believe AI will enable introductory computer science classes to tackle big concepts.
Many beginning students get stuck writing very simple code, say Dr. Zingaro and Dr. Porter. They never move on to more advanced questions – and many still can’t write simple code after completing the course.
“It’s not just uninteresting, it’s frustrating,” adds Dr. Porter. “They’re trying to build something and they forgot a semicolon and they lose three hours looking for that missing semicolon” or some other piece of syntax that prevents some code from executing correctly.
AI doesn’t make these mistakes and allows computer science professors to spend more time teaching higher-level skills.
The professors now ask their students to break down a large problem into smaller questions or tasks for the code to perform. They also ask students to test and debug code once it has already been written.
“If we get a bigger picture of what we want our students to do, we want them to write software that is meaningful to them,” says Dr. Porter. “And this process of writing software takes this quite large, often not well-defined problem and figures out: How can I break it into pieces?”
Magdalena Balazinska, director of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, embraces the progress AI has made.
“With the support of AI, human software engineers can focus on the most interesting part of computer science: answering big questions about software design,” she says. “AI ensures that people can focus on creative work.”
Not all professors in the field believe AI should be integrated into the curriculum. Some interviewed for a University of California in San Diego research paper and in an education week questionnaire prefer to block or deny the use of ChatGPT or similar tools like Photomath, at least in the short term.
Professors Zingaro and Porter argue that reading a lot of code generated by AI doesn’t feel like cheating. It’s about how a student will learn.
“I think a lot of programmers read a lot of code, just as I think the best writers read a lot of written text,” says Dr. Zingaro. “I think this is a very powerful way to learn.”
This piece is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, fof the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight different newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina and The Seattle Keer . To read more of the partnership’s work, visit its website.