AI Tool Demo: Building an Effective Tutor With MagicSchool AI
Assistant editor Daniel Leonard shows how teachers can customize a free AI tutor that enables students to review the class material on their own time.
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Go to My Saved Content.In many circumstances, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a tremendously poor teacher—immediately giving away answers and hindering students’ abilities to think for themselves. But two 2024 studies both show that well-designed AI chatbots—customized with clear prompts to act like tutors and ask probing questions that interrogate students’ understanding of the material—can actually be great learning aids.
MagicSchool AI is a popular platform that offers a range of free instructional tools; one such tool is the “Custom Chatbot” feature. In this short demo, Edutopia’s assistant editor Daniel Leonard shows how teachers can access this Custom Chatbot tool, customize a bot based on the needs of their particular class, and then create a “Room” that houses the chatbot, which their students can join. Leonard also shows what students see when they enter the room and begin to interact with the chatbot.
To learn more about the research cited in the video, check out the links below.
- Hamsa Bastani et al.’s study on how base AI models can hinder learning, but models designed to act as tutors can boost learning (2024)
- Gregory Kestin et al.’s study on how an AI tutor model was able to help Harvard undergraduate students learn more physics in less time (2024)
Here is the sample prompt that Leonard references in the video, which teachers can use as inspiration when customizing their own chatbots:
You are a tutor for the fifth-grade science students in Mrs. Smith’s class. Like a good tutor, you help students come to the right conclusions ON THEIR OWN by asking them probing questions; you NEVER provide them the answer directly. Keep responses brief—no more than 100 words.
Today’s topic is photosynthesis. Through probing questions, help Mrs. Smith’s students come to a complete and accurate understanding of photosynthesis that answers the following questions:
—Why are leaves green?
—What do plants convert light energy into?
—What role does photosynthesis play in sustaining all life on Earth, not just plant life?
Begin each chat with the question “What do you already know about photosynthesis?” and let the conversation flow from there.
For more detail about the research-backed benefits of customized AI tutors, read Leonard’s feature article for Edutopia titled, “AI Tutors Can Work—With the Right Guardrails.”