AI tutoring with Khanmigo in a two-year school experiment | Hacker News Reader

AI tutoring with Khanmigo in a two-year school experiment

edworkingpapers.com

61 pointsbryan067 comments

As a high schooler, the amount of AI forced down our throats is on another level. We have assignments with Claude Prose, tutors that hallucinate, and even gemini in the apps we use to access our assignments. Even my friend's brother(a 4th grader) uses AI to generate pictures for his slideshow about "Penguins". Education is definitely facing a turn, but is it for the worse?

Link: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/08/gemini-in-go...

Yes it’s for the worse. Not necessarily because AI in general but because it’s all so new no one knows what the result of using it in the classroom will be. So, consider yourselves an experiment of the “disruptive education” enterprise.

My advice: read lots of real books. Go to the library and study with real books even (especially) if it takes longer.

And write stuff. On paper with a pencil or pen.

And use chalk and slate

And actually no writing, only vocal arguments, Socrates style

This day and age you might call that debate club. :)

>read lots of real books. Go to the library and study with real books even (especially) if it takes longer.

Talk to lots of humans too. Friendships would be a nice bonus, but your real goal is to prepare for the next step after high school. Because no one else will prepare you.

College, job, trade school, military: networking will be more important than ever in a world where any non-verbal communication will have scrutiny behind it. You don't need to be a social butterfly, but get really comfortable holding conversations and listening (or at least, pretending to listen) to others' experiences. That's increasingly becoming the only way to truly stand out if you don't already own capital. We're increasingly moving away from the world where a high INT stat can carry you through life like my generation.

> high INT stat

What is this?

Intelligence statistic.

It's a reference to games where a high INT (intelligence) means your character is smarter

What a weird way of saying smarts.

It's more specific than smarts; DND has three separate stats representing your mental skills. Loosely, Intelligence is academic knowledge, Wisdom is practical understanding of the world, and Charisma is personal influence.

The parent comment is arguing you can't coast by with low WIS and CHA anymore.

It's a myers brigs matrix classification. Basically introverted thinking characteristic.

No, it's from Dungeons & Dragons. Characters have six primary stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, shortered to STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS and CHA.

Myers-Briggs are four character strings, not three.

Can you talk more about this? This is super interesting! You should write a blog post about this.

I think, IMHO, that AI is a growing problem in education, not because it gives answers to HW or tests, but because it stifles the creative thinking schools are supposed to preach(The HW and tests are more like a side hustle). We don't know the full impacts of AI, but from what I've seen, AI is kind of destroying our education system from the inside. Using AI, people just don't have a creative spark anymore, hw assignments that are submitted all look the same with GenAI prose, and with context, AI tutors just give answers to people without explaining the concept. On the flip side, the scores on tests in my schools are higher(Most of them just test basic memorizing), but the Homework scores are some of the lowest, creating a somewhat inverted diagram of scores.

A blog post is a fantastic idea :)

I'm sure that there is an AI out there that can help with the blog post...

/duck

Yes, or in general, I recommend them to create a blog (whether about this topic or about any other topic) as it can help them write and it's just a fun thing to do. Also I hope I am able to convey my emotion properly but "nobody on the internet cares!" so it can be liberating to write how you actually wish to write and to write just for the sake of writing and for the fact that if the process of writing could help yourself get better clarity or would have helped you get some realizations which previously would've been harder to get at.

I think that making blog posts is cool but there is just a lack of information about it or it feels like, "oh this is not for me, its for people who actually know what they are talking about or people much smarter/experienced than me" so I hope that they realize that its okay to still write the blog nonetheless.

[I am currently in first year of uni, so I had started my blog in high school and I remember all the things that made me not wish to start the blog, ironically this means that I have comments on hackernews which are more blog/article like], I wish to compile all the reasons to blog as a teenager list perhaps :-D

Where is this slop coming from, mainly? From publishers or the teachers themselves? Who are the worst offenders?

It's a mixture of both, really. On one hand we got Google Classroom and other study platforms pushing every AI Tutor they can towards us students. On the other hand, teachers(Some might be good, but it's a growing problem) frequently hand us assignments created with Claude and ChatGPT. The school then forbids us to use AI, but there's no way to police this anymore, and we gets points taken off if we don't sounds like GPT's perfect answer. I think the worst offenders, IMHO, are the publishers who force us to use AI, but teachers definitely have a fault in it themselves.

I think that I might be just 1 year elder than you but I am in first year of college and we had a prof com exam (just yesterday)

while preparing for it, aside from the slides, our sir had also given us a pdf and I just had the vibe because of the law of triads (AI talks much more in threes) and so I decided to give it to pangram to find out it was 77% written by AI.

The sir himself said that chatgpt is a tool and should be used in a good way rather than a bad way but seeing this and other things, I am unsure if how he used it was entirely good or not. In plain words, after finding that, I was unable to discover how much real effort was put in the pdf by sir and how much of it was just replacable (if not even better) if people just prompt it directly themselves.

I am going quiet frequently to the library and otherwise and the amount of ChatGPT/Claude which is opened is quite staggering and nearly every exam is involving that in some form or other and I was discussing just that or similar with my friends yesterday. AI has changed education in this sense (for better or for worse), I think slightly for worse in terms of that its making people lose trust in connections/relationships (teachers for students and students for teachers and vice versa)

But is also providing a way to customized learning when all else fails. I use it in my own studies and I think that it's good but also it makes me sometimes feel like I am learning something when I might not accurately be doing so and I think that learning still involves struggling with hard problems yourselves which well, the AI can't do it for you. Also I really really hate how sycophantic these models have become and I am observing slightly them being more dumb in the web intefaces

Example: chatgpt made an error within johari window and made hidden/blind swap their places in it yet still said that self-disclosure/feedback was vertical/horizontal respectively, so it was actually wrong in saying so and only because I had known the slides and read it all that I caught it.

Also welcome to hackernews, I hope you enjoy your stay and stay curious, I hope that you don't get hackernews addiction like I have gotten, haha :-D

Parents are collectively sending their children to the wolves to fend for themselves, all because a little YAML touched them where they didn't want to and couldn't handle it.

I hope the kids remember this.

What the actual fuck are you even talking about

We saw this when it was released, and it's not because of any amazing prescience.

https://blog.comini.in/p/why-khanmigo-will-fail

It's just quite obvious when you run a school (we do). It's because AI is focused on making the mechanics easy. But as long as we focus on measurement (how much are they learning) and start from there, the near-term focus is inevitable on the surface mechanics of learning (can they decode or encode when reading, do their tables etc)

Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement

The natural order of learning is when we are allowed to discover, explore, find meaning. This motivates us to focus on getting better, mastery, which is where mechanics should come in. And finally, because it is helpful to know where we are generally, we measure some outcomes. But schooling systems have completely inverted this!

More here if anyone's interested: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

I rather think it might fail because it adds not much above what Codex or Claude already adds. What won't happen is kids not using LLMs to learn. I doubt anyone would disagree with this.

Actually, the most important thing about learning is caring. "Why should I care about algebra? Oh, it can help me in my business? OK, will learn!".

It's hard to find meaning at the time, though. How is a middle-schooling thinking about using algebra in their business?

I remember being funny and putting my hand up in Latin class and asking "Sir, why are we learning a dead language?"

Years later as a language nerd I wish I had paid a lot more attention.

That sounds like meaning and motivation to me.

> Why should I care about algebra? Oh, it can help me in my business? OK, will learn!

Kid do not think that way. Heck, even adults oftentimes have hard time to think that way. But kids especially dont drive motivation from long term utility.

This is a category error.

Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics, but Measurement is how you know that Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics, and, more importantly, Measurement is how you prove to anyone else that Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics (or even that you've built any motivation in your students at all).

Measurement is how you prove that your approach (as opposed to anyone else's) is worth people investing their time and money with you.

Trust > Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics. How do you earn trust from a stranger? Measurement.

A very honest take. They tried something, it showed a very small improvement, and they acknowledged it. Acknowledging that the cause appears to be a lack of engagement agrees with my own experience. You can give students great tools but that doesn’t make them interested in math. Khanmigo might be a good tutor but it won’t help unless you’re chaining kids to a desk and not letting them leave until they finish some quota of problems.

I wondered how he didn't see this coming from a mile away, but in looking up more about Sal Khan himself, the surprising thing is that he never had any 'normal' teaching experience, and that explains everything. In a normal classroom, good kids don't need teachers. You could give them a book (or some Khan Academy videos, or a reliable LLM) and they'd learn the material far faster than you can teach it. Now let's talk about the other 95% of kids...

Those other 95% are going to generally have either a lack of motivation or a lack of intelligence. And for these kids a good teacher can do a lot, but actually teaching the material itself is a relatively small part of it. It's about giving them that motivation, or adjusting the material for slower students. And most importantly, it's about doing all of this without making it apparent that you're doing this, since keeping it feeling 'natural' is an important part of making it feel interesting and also helping to build a better rapport with the kids. That rapport/connection building is critical, and completely outside the domain of LLMs.

A lot of academically successful people recieve everything but a "normal" education. They are the ones who have developed the ability to self study from a young age and have the drive. As cliche as it is, a lot of the academically successful students I see are the ones who are passionately curious. While many of the Asian kids are obviously more inclined to be more motivated (due to their parents), this motivation makes them passionate at the very least. Some other students simply love the thrill of being better than their classmates. From my observation, a lot of those kids love going to schools where they are challenged and all their peers are equally if not better than them. This cycle is ONE of the MANY reasons why they are so successful.

If I could rephrase this, I wonder if you're also saying in a way that 5% of people are naturally self-driven but for 95% of people, the relationship matters more than what they're doing. If they have a connection with the teacher, then they'll learn.

Have there been cases where kids in the 95% did end up being self-driven about a particular topic that they had an interest in? Or did they always need to be given motivation?

There are not that many super educated autodictats. If you take that good kid out from the classroom and put them into a library with no teacher and no peers in it, their education is likely to just stop or severely slow down.

It probably isn't a good tutor, I'm using frontier SOTA models and whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding but just spam out unrelated simplistic metaphors, can only imagine how much worse the models the kids had access to were, LLMs don't have understanding and can't fake it either, there's no conception of how a memory might be formed or something might be understood, without that qualia it can't be a good teacher it can only output text that looks like it might be a good explanation until you read it

A good tutor builds an understanding of the learners current mental model then tries to broaden it with targeted materials (text, diagrams, videos), selected exercises, the Socratic method ... All LLMs can do is produce text that statistically looks like tutoring. AI has a lot of uses but tutoring is not a great fit. I think a well written textbook even would be better than AI because the author can have a general understanding of where the target audience is usually at and where they're expected to end up.

Agreed, I need to do a lot of prompt crafting when some math academy thing is explained poorly by them.

What sometimes helps is to ask them to make something interactive and visual. Like 3B1B does

> whenever I ask them to explain anything they don't consider my question and don't display any understanding

You are absolutely doing it wrong.

My experience is completely different. It doesn’t take a frontier model to give a good explanation (likely plagiarized from a textbook or a “blank for dummies” article).

Try a bit harder to tell it your background and the kind of analogies you want and don’t want.

Possibly this is topic-dependent. Most of my queries are about science and math.

In the first instance you had to learn how to learn. The kid that doesn’t know this yet isn’t going to try harder.

My strongest subjects where I showed the most interest were based on like 25% natural interest and 75% how I vibed with the teacher and they vibed with me, atleast in High School.

University is definately more interest based but my success was still very influenced by the quality of instructor. The materials and methods are important but not nearly as much as the quality of instructor.

"the cause appears to be a lack of engagement"

"...unless you’re chaining kids to a desk and not letting them leave until they finish some quota of problems."

Uhm, hey, could we talk for a quick minute after this meeting? No, no worries - it's just that the other teachers and I were wondering if we could have a quick chat about what "engagement" means :)

Humor aside, your point is very valid - interest in a topic is often a prerequisite to someone engaging with a topic. Even stuff like "I hate this class, but I gotta do well if I want to become a doctor someday" is based on an interest in that longer-term goal.

I’m not advocating for the practice of chaining kids to a desk…

I’m trying to point out that a tool might be helpful for you to practice, but if it isn’t used then the tool can’t help. Maybe if you were forced to use the tool then you could see the benefit, but as you noticed, the act of “forcing” something may feel undesirable from a moral perspective.

Yeah I tried Khanmigo with my daughters and it just didn't stick. Tried making my own that just would piece meal out the answer and strive to gamify it with kudos.

I feel weird now to think it but some problems are people just trying to shoe horn AI into something and hope it works out. My kids just didn't want to use their brain once something just spat out the answers. Even if it output all the work they'd just keep pressing for the answer and go next. It really showed up in test scores where it wasn't working when their homework was usually A- in algebra. What has helped me when using AI is it gives me a place much faster to be able to start. I can easily take a pic or draw on a tablet and get it classified in a way so I can start helping her. Now the issue is meeting her in the middle she prefers apps and tech not face to face help.

So I made our own thing where it only doles out clues and I get a report back that summarizes the session and how the AI thinks it went. I then take it and give her a reward if she does it week to week. Still though this is a perplexing problem. Feel free to check out what I made (trying to monetize something anything nowadays seems shilling) Cluestep.com

My wife thinks it could make money but there's a ton of competition out there. Would love your input.

Why does it give out the answer so easily? That sounds like a design flaw...

https://www.pangram.com/history/2e681dd5-5fbb-4eb8-8562-973b...

This is page 4-11

The abstract is also AI generated. Good god people.

It's AI all the way down, brother.

the matrix got it wrong. we aren't being put into a virtual world so that our value can be extracted. the real world is being made more virtual by the day.

Conclusion: "The binding constraint appears to be engagement: realizing the promise of AI tutoring will require getting students to use it, not just giving them access."

clearly gen AI prose sadly

Related: there is another learning tool being developed by Khan Academy called “Khanductor” meant to satisfy the need for better assessments. I feel like this a more achievable goal than the lofty one set out by Khanmigo to replace a human tutor and I wish Sal Khan and his team the best in their pursuit of finding viable use of popularized AI learning assistane. It just feels like it’s an uphill battle. There are already great tools for students to use like “LearnLM” models to assess gaps in knowledge. In my opinion this experiment just goes to show that any learning tool, AI or otherwise, will be best utilized best by driven students, ignored by the apathetic, and used by unmotivated as a means to cheat and shortcut their way through school.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rBsiKjVI7tc&pp=0gcJCY8Co7VqN5tD&...

Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49409862

Sal Khan: The amazing AI super tutor for students and teachers [video] | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35791433

New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...

Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and ‘use AI instead’ https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/tutoring-com...

Remedial students, already checked out，barely used it.

How about a more assertive and active AI tutor and some consequences for not doing work? That is one thing about a human tutor. They are physically right there versus an AI that is waiting for the student to do something.

So for remedial students try a system that has timers for inactivity and real life consequences for ignoring the system.

Need to do a study with students that are average or above average.

> Messages that students did send were mostly bare answers

This has been my observation in university as well. LLMs can be valuable in digesting proofs into smaller, workable pieces (e.g researching the origin of a particular linear algebra property). This however requires solid fundamentals and the ability to dissect proofs. In spite of this people with neither usually reach straight to the solution out of sheer desperation (myself included).

> The binding constraint appears to be engagement: realizing the promise of AI tutoring will require getting students to use it, not just giving them access.

This seems backward. Engaging students should be the primary goal, not AI tutoring. Great teachers engage students. Perhaps AI can somehow aid teachers in becoming better? [Though, I doubt it]

Maybe the AI can help them not quit in their first two years, when they realize what the job really entails. It’s a profession powered by idealism but the long-timers often have the cynicism of former idealists. Not always! But it’s a tough gig that attracts dreamers.

I have found this with my kids as well. I have an AI writing tutor that they use but only one of the two actually likes engaging with it. The other gets easily disengaged.

Some kids will be able to learn at a record pace with AI, others will need to be brought along in the usual ways via good teaching that fosters engagement.

My son does not have a great opinion of any edtech -- AI or not. I would wager that if you asked any kid his age they'd rather have better air conditioning than another expensive bit of software they hate using.

I would argue too much EdTech is not actually edtech. Too often, it's just tech packaged slightly for Ed.

for the kid that is not engaged, ask them what they like / care about. a kid that really likes minecraft, you can have the SI put the information in minecraft terms. it would then be more personalized to the kid and the kid is more likely to be engaged. meet your kid where they are.

That's part of it already haha. I think it's just some uncanny valley thing for him where he knows it's not "real" and it doesn't click with him. The other one loves talking to AI characters (yes we review the convos to check for anything weird) and he took to it right away.

My casual interpretation is that most kids didn't want to use the AI tutor. The authors estimate that time spent using the AI tutor is as effective as time spent studying without AI assistance, which is around one fourth as effective as studying with a real tutor. The real tutors are obviously quite expensive, comparatively.

So, if some kids do prefer studying with this AI tutor, that's as good as studying without it. Whichever approach gets them to put the study time in.

> The authors estimate that time spent using the AI tutor is as effective as time spent studying without AI assistance, which is around one fourth as effective as studying with a real tutor.

I find that surprising. I would expect the AI tutor to add noticeable value over studying static written material.

I guess that’s why they do studies.

Hopefully not. If your model of what happened here is "well, they did a study, and that resolved the question", you know less now than you did before you heard about the study.

That’s not my model.

You said “I would expect…” and posited something that sounds reasonable but might not be true. Questioning a hunch seems like a good reason to look at data.

Does one paper ever resolve a question fully, beyond doubt? Rarely.

> I would expect the AI tutor to add noticeable value over studying static written material

Why would you think that? The act of (human) tutoring is absolutely the opposite of how these chatbots are built. Tutors are proactive, not reactive.

blah blah blah.

Understood, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something else here.

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