👩‍🏫🚀 The Classroom of the Future: Every Teacher, an EdTech Founder

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a physics teacher.

It’s Sunday, and you remember that you need to prepare the materials for the week so that your students learn Newton's third law: action and reaction (we all know it by heart, perhaps thanks to the choristers, but we remember little of what it means, haha).

You go to Bing Chat (which is the free, internet-connected version of GPT-4) to help you recall this concept and bring it to practical examples for the students.

Perfect. You take this to a presentation, and you have your first class.

Now let’s suppose that at the end of the class, you want to assign an essay on the topic as homework. But how do we evaluate it?

The next day, your students arrive with their essays. Obviously, you pass them to your assistant Bing Chat for review.

We’re doing well, but you realize that your students are not very motivated with the subject. They are 15-year-olds who need to interact with each other and move around.

The activity was a success! But you feel that there are still some students who don’t fully understand the concept. You know that one way to reach them is through technology (what 15-year-old doesn’t spend 5 hours a day playing on their phone?).

So you ask Bing Chat: “Give me the code for a small game to teach the concept behind Newton's third law to my students.”

You bring the game to your students so they can experiment with their own hands, that “every force exerted on a body responds with another of equal magnitude but opposite direction.”

I’m not so sure how this game teaches the concept of action-reaction, but it looks nice 🤌

You finish the week with a mini-test to ensure that your students learned.

Let’s step out of the role-play to reflect on a few things.

First, it’s impressive how with just a few words I can generate a lot of material. In total, I used 256 words in my “prompts,” which produced 2800 words in the responses. For every word I provided, Bing Chat returned 10.

On the other hand, obviously, what I received is not perfect. It would be very irresponsible of a teacher to copy and paste what Bing Chat delivers to create their classes. But it allows me to start with 80% of the work done, instead of starting from scratch. And that’s the power of these tools: to do 80% of the boring work, so I can focus on the remaining 20% that is worthwhile.

But the most important reflection for me is that in the not-so-distant future, every teacher will become an EdTech founder. It’s as if you gave each teacher a team of programmers and a curriculum team, and the teacher became a “conductor” who asks their teams for the technology and materials needed to maximize learning in their students.

PD: the game didn’t work for me the first time by copying and pasting the code. I had to have a mini back-and-forth conversation with Bing Chat to help me resolve some issues. Additionally, I had to provide the images of the rocket and the asteroids. Nevertheless, an interesting result for so little effort. I also see how in the future, this type of tool will be able to review its own errors and deliver complete games and activities without mistakes.

PD2: the central idea of this post comes from this by Ethan Mollick. I recommend following him if you’re interested in staying updated on AI advancements in education.