Synthesis Tutor – Math tutor for children
synthesis.com
synthesis.com
"Mom, imagine you have the number 101 in binary. The first 1 is the fours spot, so you have 4. There's none in the twos spot. and 1 in the ones spot. So that means you have 5."
Two days later he came into my office and asked if he could do more tutor.
That's a huge win in my book!
(No affiliation - just a happy customer.)
- focused on mastery
- good treatment of math
How it's different:
- doesn't cover elementary school topics
- lessons are text, not video
- paid, not free
- lessons are presented based on what you already know (e.g. you can't choose to study a topic before you've demonstrated mastery of all topics it depends on)
- I pick the next lesson from a very small set (usually 5 options, sometimes fewer), so there's no wasting time choosing what to study next
- really great spaced repetition system that prevents forgetting
As an educator who has taught math: this is frustrating junk. It moves at a crawl. It doesn't explain the reasoning for anything. It provides no motivation.
It's full of incorrect statements like "Computers struggle with too many digits."
Pretty much the worst practice if you want to teach someone anything.
For integers, overflow behavior is pretty easy to understand.
Million-digit numbers are absurdly large in terms of physical quantities, but can easily arise when one is enumerating possibilities, such as the number of ways that one could give out randomized phone numbers to everyone in a city.
(That's the sort of explanation that my mathematically-inclined friends and I would have understood in grades 3-5, when we learned about integers, rational and irrational numbers, and basic probability/combinatorics, as well as simple algorithms for multi-digit arithmetic and conversion between integer and decimal fractions.)
Factorial and exponential functions were (and are) fun to play with on calculators because of the large numbers you can generate; python and mathematica are even more fun of course. I think recent TI and Casio graphing calculators support python, though I don't know about their bignum support or memory limits.
>>> a=10**(1000000)
>>> b=a//3
>>> len(str(b))
1000000
There are two sources of error here:
1. Your interpretation is essentially "computers struggle to complete tasks that are impossible for them to complete" - a meaningless tautology. At best it is "nothing scales infinitely" which perhaps is a bit more useful as a refutation for complaints that something "doesn't scale" in an unlimited fashion, but that doesn't seem to be the context here.
2. "Too large" is ambiguous. If it's "too large for computers to handle" then it devolves into the above meaningless tautology. However, a sensible and common interpretation would be to interpret "if <something> is too large" as "if <something> is very large" - but we know that computers can in fact handle numbers with huge digit counts (somewhere between 1 and 60+ million.)
So the original statement is either a largely meaningless tautology or something that is misleading and/or incorrect. PP's criticism is valid.
You don't need to tell kids things that are misleading nonsense. It only confuses them more. You can be precise and high level at the same time.
In no sense do computers struggle with digits. That's a misleading confusing statement and it's not appropriate at any age.
I don't know whether you mean "teach" or "tech" here, but this seems to be an ad hominem argument.
Regardless, I would submit that clarity and correctness matter both in teaching and in tech.
Correctness, of the sort you are implying are absolutely not appropriate at all levels. There’s a reason kids in second grade are told that you can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller one, for instance.
2. In grades 1-2 (iirc) we applied negative numbers when we talked about the number line (which we had on the wall.) Even preschoolers knew about negative temperatures on the thermometer.
3. See PP's original comment.
I just don't trust companies that try to give the impression that they've worked it out already - and this one seems even worse at that than the language thing.
I am not a coder yet, but always wanna learn it, and indeed self learning elementory level math now. I felt I was so stupid when I tried to read even very basic CS materials, watch Youtube videos, I was very struggle with very basic things, also have no consistent time, then stopped many times, so now I start to learn basic math again, then consider the CS50/Youtube/CS books -->coding/game engine this routine.
I finished the demo, I never experienced such a good interractive learning way before, and thrilled want to tell everyone whom want to learn things a great tool like this exists.
Now I know, there are great tools like this one, learning thing is not necessarily borning and hard, it can be easy and smoothing, and a nice enjoy.
I hope guys/gals can make more tools like this.
PS: "timed out for waiting speech" is a bit annoying in Chrome, maybe I got slow internet? Also, the voice is robotic, maybe use a more lively sound would be better?
I can't wait for next lessons, I want to learn things like this way!!
Good content is obviously important, but there are literally millions of teachers redundantly creating content every year. It's easy enough to create canonical good content, no AI needed.
I imagine this will be completely ineffective or even counterproductive to an unmotivated, poorly behaved child.
Personally I found the demo kind of cringe - why the drake meme? Computers do not "struggle with too many digits" why use a metaphor that's just wrong?
With the "1 to 2 Machine" Demo the only feedback you get on no action is "green box is looking a bit empty." Not engaging really.
I think this would be useful for a motivated kid, but in that case Khan Academy already has way more content and is free. Don't see why you'd pay $50/month. That's to say nothing of YouTube which has even more content than Khan Academy, and is again free (or $15 if you don't want the ads).
Finally, I don't really see the "AI" here. The demo as constructed is basically a Google Slide deck with some JavaScript sprinkled in. A true "AI" experience would be that you, at any moment can ask for help and contextually it would help you. So in the case I described earlier it might go back and redisplay with arrows, or perhaps make the colors even more obvious.
(- the core infrastructure engineer on this project)
A real tutor would actively assess the points of misunderstanding and develop new strategies for helping the learner understand. This tutor mostly seems interested in moving the learner to the next step of the lesson.
its a solid basis, i'm excited for all the topics they say they're covering
The issue is that these things go off the rails sometimes. Without any supervision and as an “educational” resource it will be unquestioned and in front of people who don’t know enough to question it.
It can be a good tool.
Now, is it reasonable to expect children to be skeptical about everything the AI tutor is telling them? Probably not? Maybe?
We've all had human teachers make mistakes or bullshit, maybe we can accept some fallibility in these LLMs too.
That might be the single most important thing to teach children now.
Knowledge is much more fallible than many appreciate. Many of the “universal” truths of today were once unknown or controversial. Our understanding of the world is built on a giant set of shoulders, of all those who have come before us. We do ourselves a great disservice not to acknowledge, understand, and appreciate how something came to be “true”.
I mean people can be terrible. But a teacher is a trusted profession and likely needs that paycheck and will avoid doing stupid things to loose that.
I don’t think LLM care one way or another. Someone should ask one.