AI tutors vs school

My kids have been playing around with Khanmigo, and wow it’s really good!

But also, it’s not perfect, so this is a first effort to articulate why, which I hope will lead me toward the ideal path for us (or a new startup idea, you never know!)

First great thing - your kid can talk to it, and it speaks back - just turn on both microphone and sound output. This is a game-changer compared to earlier AI tutors/chatbots, where kids can’t type or read fast enough for it to be fun.

It can be infuriating, that it refuses to just “answer the question” the way ChatGPT/Gemini/etc do. It always starts responding with a question like “well what do you think?”. But always at the end of a session, I find myself thinking “wow, that was actually better than if it just answered the question”. It seems to figure out if you already know something or if it needs to teach you more. And it seems to handle kid responses well (“I dunno”, or if they say silly stuff it recovers back to the topic). It asks your grade level for every session, so you don’t need multiple accounts for multiple kids.

As an example of a great thread: my kid asked a suspicious question about, are foods delicious when browned (as I had been claiming, mmm), or are they actually burned? The response mentioned the Maillard reaction, changes in proteins/sugars, and then asked the kid what they think happens with several other foods (boiling potatoes? roasting coffee beans?), and when they correctly answered that boiling/steaming doesn’t cause the Maillard reaction, it asked some followup questions about what they think will happen if the food is crowded in the pan vs spread it out. So they ended up learning more than just the answer to their question. Awesome!

But, the weaknesses so far are a lack of emotional connection, no tracking achievements, or social proof. It doesn’t produce on-the-fly visuals, diagrams, etc. And it’s just not engaging enough.

Visuals

I think I have realistic expectations here - I’m not imagining something like the Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age. As a specific example, my kid was asking about the difference between solstices and equinoxes. I ended up grabbing our globe to help support the explanation, but I imagine GPT4o would have been able to produce a diagram of the earth going around the sun, and that might have done the trick. Maybe I should have shown it a picture of a globe?

Emotional connection, achievements, social proof

I’m not sure what I’m looking for here… in the moment, Khanmigo says things like “great job!” but it doesn’t really tell you how you’re doing. Maybe a list of topics you’ve mastered? Maybe some kind of achievement test in a broad area that could be used as a ‘certificate’? Maybe some social features showing what your friends are learning about, to give you ideas?

Engagement

For reasons I don’t fully understand yet, my kids don’t ask to use Khanmigo. I have to push it on them, which if I do if I’m busy, or if I’m not 100% confident in my knowledge on some topic. But given the choice, they would much rather talk to an adult they know, even if I tell them the answer will be less good. And once their question is answered in Khanmigo, they just walk away. I have to suggest followup questions, but Khanmigo itself will just wait for the kid to engage. A good tutor would just have a ready list of new topics that they think the kid is ready to learn about next. Dreambox is another example of a very educational software that can keep their attention for 1-2 hours - something about the characters and the music?

Khanmigo needs more dark patterns I guess:)