Some of my strongest memories from growing up, while not my fondest, are struggling with my math homework at the kitchen table while my parents fruitlessly tried to help me. OpenAI today hopes its newest ChatGPT feature will help students (and parents) avoid such, uh, intense bonding.
The new interactive learning experiences, as the company called them in a blog post on Tuesday, intend to illustrate complex ideas. The new answers include interactive widgets, so you can adjust different numbers in a formula and see how the answer changes.
For example, if you ask ChatGPT to help you understand the Pythagorean theorem, the chatbot is now going to do more than just tell you it’s a formula used to calculate the side length of right-angled triangles. It will bring up a triangle model in its answer and prompt you to play around with the side lengths, allowing you to watch in real time how the formula changes. The ability of the AI to illustrate complex STEM concepts should help students struggling to understand how all the pieces fit together.
The new charts and widgets aim to help students understand abstract concepts.
There’s added help for more than 70 different concepts from math and science, primarily from high school and college-level courses. The concepts come from algebra, geometry, calculus and physics. It’s available now globally for all logged-in ChatGPT users.
OpenAI reports that 140 million people use ChatGPT for math and science help each week. Last summer it beefed up its educational offerings with Study Mode, which aims to make the chatbot more of a digital tutor than an answer machine. The company said that it plans introduce more education-minded features, but the debate about the role AI should (or shouldn’t) play in education rages on.
Like every industry, AI in education has fans and opponents. Studies have found that students who outsource entire assignments to AI, like having a chatbot write an essay, aren’t always using or building critical thinking skills. AI programs designed to do homework for students are popular but worrisome. But smaller, more practical applications of AI hold promise to help students learn, especially as they prepare to enter a workforce that is now rapidly adopting AI.