The Potential of MathGPT

The Hope

If you're in a classroom currently, you're no doubt contemplating where artificial intelligence fits. It's not possible to "ban" it as many have called for. It's baked into all the digital tools you use in your classroom already. The trick is to understand the ai tools and then craft processes for their use in your classroom. With a process, they're a tool, not a "get the answer quickly" cheat code that leaves the learner in no better state than they began.

Have you ever had 30 students in your class at varying degrees of understanding while teaching a math lesson? Mike raises his hand.

Could you adequately differentiate for that many students while being available for learners? Negative, Ghost Rider.

And pulling small groups? Nah.

And maintaining your own mental health? Mike shakes his head vigorously.

And drinking your coffee while it's still hot? Mike gasps audibly and faints.

Someone in your class is probably not getting their needs met at the pace they need them to be met and you're probably frustrated. You need tools that can help support the lessons you're teaching without replacing the lesson you're teaching. Enter MathGPT.

The Dope

1. Remember Photomath? It was the app that allowed you to solve problems by taking pictures, this is similar. Screenshot or paste the text of the math problem and add it to the conversation.
2. You can chat and create video. After you've uploaded the problem, you'll receive the answer. You can continue to converse with the bot until your questions are answered or have a video tutorial created to explain it.
3. It more immediate and you can chat in IRL. The feedback for the math conversations are more immediate than they'd be if you had to answer every learner's question. However, you could have classroom discussions about the outputs from the chats. Every conversations comes with a "copy" option that could be uploaded to a discussion in your learning management system, for example.

The Nope

1. Cookies. There are definitely cookies. These little snippets of code that make themselves at home in your browser are wonderful, if you get the option to to opt out. However, no such notice and option are presented to the user.
2. How free is "free?" You can use the tool without an account, but I used my Google account to sign up anyway. MathGPT Unlimited is $9.99 per month, but there is no explanation of the limits of deciding not to pay for the service.
3. You need processes. You probably don't want to just send learners to services like this as a first resort. Build in processes that use MathGPT as a strategy after attempting strategies that have been presented by humans in the classroom.