alt Hacker News> Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.
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Elizabeth here, co-founder (and clinical child psychologist). Fair question. Catalin's post was about the engineering (he is my co-founder and our CTO), so the learning side got short shrift :).
Here's what it actually looks like for a child. Say a 6-year-old is reading a story out loud (I will use a reading example here). The tutor is listening to every word. When she stumbles on "chick," it doesn't just tell her the word; it decides, based on her history, whether to break it into sounds, point back to a pattern she's seen before, or let her wrestle with it a moment longer because she's close. If she misses the same pattern twice, that digraph shows up woven into her next story. If she reads fluently but can't tell the character what happened in the comprhension conversation after the story, she gets another text to work on comprehension instead of just pushing harder words. The instructional approach isn't novel or new, it's what a good teacher does, grounded in the science of learning. We run evals on the interactions and real subject matter experts are grading and annotating the behavior. What's new is doing it responsively, for one specific child, on every turn.
On engagement: I'd push back a little on the framing that engagement and learning are separate things (anyone on our team will tell you this is a drum I have beaten for years). A disengaged child learns nothing, no matter how good the pedagogy is. But we're not optimizing for time-on-screen. The lessons and sessions are bounded. The engagement work exists so the child stays in the productive struggle zone long enough for the teaching to happen.
Why AI: it's not that AI "needs" to be the solution. In fact, a great human tutor is better, full stop, but it has never scaled. A classroom teacher with 25+ kids teaches to the middle. This is the first technology that can make real-time, child-specific teaching decisions, which is what tutoring actually is. More on the pedagogy here if you're curious: https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach)
Yeah totally. Here's a video that shows some parts of the experience: https://x.com/CatalinVoss/status/2074527066926776802?s=20
The long and short of it: We use AI to scaffold in the moment and respond to what a child is struggling with or excited by. At times, we allow them to follow their curiosity and at times we guide them through a curriculum. At times, we get them to do both of those things, e.g. you can make a book about a topic you're interested in and then take that curious drive to ultimately learn to decode words using phonics and practice reading skills. There is time for what our learning designers call "productive struggle" and then there's time to jump in and support.
Under the hood, there are activities and learning objectives designed by experts and a teaching toolkit that distills everything they know about how to effectively teach kids across several subjects. A real-time planner then decides what to apply when. Without this interactivity, you pretty much get static content delivery and gameplay which is what traditional edtech delivers. With it, you can find the shortest path to getting the "ahhhh I get it now" moment.
There's also a bit more context on our website https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach