Khanmigo, the chatbot that wants to tutor the students of tomorrow

Khanmigo, the chatbot that wants to tutor the students of tomorrow.Now being tested in Silicon Valley.

In less than a year, ChatGpt has changed the world.Even the school sector, which has long been wondering about the impact that technology is having and will have.ChatGpt is a chatbot, a program with which to discuss (via chat, in fact) using the powerful artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI.As such, ChatGpt can provide answers to many questions, generating texts, comments and solving exercises on behalf of users.

The use of the chatbot between students and teachers

The consequences of this technology for teaching have been notable, as was easy to predict.According to some polls made in the United States, a third of college students have used the chatbot in their homework (of these, the majority say they have used it systematically), and the percentage of users even increases among teachers, who in many cases they approve use by their students.Everywhere, online and offline, worried discussions among parents, teachers, guardians and various citizens are multiplying on the effects that ChatGpt could have on the learning ability of young people.

What is certain is that a similar innovation can only cause a distortion of the teaching proposal, especially in terms of tasks.Assigning research to be done at home (on the Lombards, for example) no longer makes sense today, because the risk of someone using ChatGpt is very high and a similar test would not test the abilities of the class.In a similar scenario, the teacher would have the task of recognizing the traces left by the AI ​​- to understand whether that text was "generated" or thought of and then written by a human being.

Bill Gates and the Khan Academy

At the same time, however, reducing the ChatGpt phenomenon to a tool for cheating and saving time and effort would be wrong.In addition to rethinking homework, it is also necessary to venture into an exercise of imagination:Is it possible to imagine a similar chatbot but capable of having an educational application?At a recent conference, Bill Gates has addressed the theme ensuring that “artificial intelligences will get to that point, to be the best tutor a human can have”.The Microsoft co-founder – now involved in philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – is not the only one to glimpse a scenario of enormous possibility behind this technology.

Among the initiatives that his institution has financed (with more than ten million dollars) is that of the Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization founded in 2006 and specialized in digital learning, which is working on a product similar.As it has explained the New York Times, the Academy developed Khanmigo, a chatbot designed to accompany young students, repeating important notions to them, asking questions and measuring results or any gaps.It is currently being tested at a school - the Khan Lab School, in the heart of Silicon Valley - where it is used by sixth grade students.

A personal tutor for everyone

According to company founder Sal Khan, a tool like Khanmigo “will allow all students in the United States, and then the world, to effectively have a very high level of personal tutoring.”The chatbot is programmed to teach step by step and compliment students on their results;it is also equipped with some guardrails, limits and control systems which allow the software to understand if the person it is teaching is having psychological problems (for example if they make references to self-harm).Khanmigo is an experiment, one of many, in an industry that is destined to undergo enormous upheavals in the coming years.And not only with regards to classwork and any "cheating", on the contrary:the advent of ChatGpt risks also changing teaching and learning in our schools.