April 9: Dan's Current Events - Is the future now for A.I.?

As a supported of formative assessing, I agree with Ramaswami that we have a wonderful opportunity to take advantage of aritficial intelligence in education. Imagine personalized and timely assessment for each student. At GHS, we were exposed to an AI solution to individualized tutoring in Chemistry through Quantum Simulations - an AI solution discussed in this article(http://www.quantumsimulations.com). Typically at the time, many tutoring programs were available, but they would store information in a database and not allow for student input beyond multiple choice answers or simple responses. It was left up to the teacher to provide this one-to -one interaction with the students. I understand that in 1998, chemist Benny Johnson founded Quantum Simulations, Inc. with high school mentor Dale Holder and colleague Rebecca Renshaw to create highly interactive tutoring software for the sciences. As the article points out, the approach of the Quantum Tutors is similar in that it "converses" with students, providing real-time feedback. This AI approach responds to student questions, gives hints, shows correct next steps and even explains why a step is correct or incorrect using scientific principles. Students can enter any problem and related work, and the Quantum Tutoring Engines will understand and analyze all of the material. Any mistakes are confronted individually, and the student and the "tutor" provide information to each other throughout the learning exercise. We found that our students not only scored higher on our summative assessments but also were more engaged in learning chemistry.