Brilliant robots that can help you with your homework have been the province of many students’ daydreams for decades. Something like Google Gemini or ChatGPT would have been as magical to me as my own Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM would have been to my parents. And kids are aware of the possibilities. More than a quarter of students have already turned to ChatGPT for homework help. That percentage is almost certainly higher when accounting for every AI chatbot option.
Google is working on its own approach to the idea, developing a version of Gemini aimed at children, according to a report from Android Authority. That includes homework help. There are a lot of obvious reasons to be worried about kids using AI for their homework. You don’t want them to outsource the learning that the homework aims to promote, and you certainly don’t want every paper and project to be written outright by an AI.
On the other hand, banning it completely is probably impossible, and teachers are left only to offer in-class tests and oral presentations. Like a lot of other technology when applied to education, though, AI could be a real boon for students, but only if approached with caution and, ideally, supervision at home. Still, I choose to be optimistic about what AI can do for kids struggling with homework.
Personalized learning
Sometimes, time runs out in class before you understand the topic. Or maybe you thought you did before you sat down to write a paper. Asking your family or friends for help may be enough, but there’s no guarantee they understand it any better than you do. And Googling a topic may not be much better at putting things in terms that help you learn.
This is where AI shines. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can offer an answer right away and tailor it to the level of the person asking, including students in different classes. Imagine a kid learning about decimals and fractions and struggling to parse a word problem. They might ask an AI chatbot for help and get a useful analogy like, “Imagine you’re slicing a pizza into ten pieces and only eat three.”
Of course, the risk here, as with all AI, is that the explanation could be wrong. Maybe not with something that basic, but there’s no way to tell when a hallucination is coming. It’s also crucial that this personalized learning doesn’t become just the AI doing the problems, hence the need for parental oversight.
Always there
Related to that is the availability of an AI assistant. Again, Googling won’t always get a kid the help they need, or at least not quickly. And AI messaging means no need to wait until the next class to try and parse a confusing bit of the textbook like it’s 1997. Kids can ask a question and get an answer instantly, even at 10:30 PM on a Sunday when they suddenly remember they have to define fifteen geometry terms by morning.
This has the same caveats, of course. There’s a fine line between a useful tutor and just getting someone else, even a digital personality, to do it for you. If the AI just hands over the answer, and the kid copies it down without thinking, then it was pointless. I’m already wary of that potential problem, but one that hopefully can be dealt with in most cases.
Learning fun
Learning is and should be fun, even if not everyone has the same interests. Still, if there’s one thing that can kill the hunger for knowledge, it’s deadly dull worksheets and essay prompts.
I hope a student using AI to help with homework might feel differently. If Gemini’s upcoming features work as I hope, it will help children turn their ideas into stories, answer random questions they have while working on homework, and maybe spark an interest in going further. Imagine a fourth grader writing a sci-fi short story with Gemini acting as sounding board and copyeditor suggesting weird alien names or helping think about what it would be like to live in a space station.
Encouraging creativity and opening doors to new topics is something AI chatbots can do for adults. It may not always be the right tool for kids doing homework, but if it can encourage asking more questions and diving into rabbit holes of knowledge even after the assignment is over, I think AI might be a great addition to a student’s toolkit, as long as it’s done with a watchful adult ensuring the AI doesn’t replace the student in completing the homework.
