AI Tools for Math Teachers
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MagicSchool: Math Tools
MagicSchool is a popular and robust AI-driven teacher assistant and lesson plan generator packed with features that greatly assist math teachers in crafting lesson plans, activities, and assessments aligned with curriculum standards.
Features: MagicSchool can help generate lesson plans, unit activities, active learning environments, or more. For math teachers, MagicSchool features a Math Spiral Review Generator, designed to provide review materials for various math topics. It's a practical tool for students preparing for exams or revisiting past topics.
Another offering is the Math Story Word Problem tool. Teachers can input a problem, and the platform generates a puzzle for students, offering a different approach to understanding the concept. In addition, there is a Table Analysis Generator that leverages AI to generate a table with data of your choice with associated questions that students can analyze in an assignment.
In 2024, MagicSchool launched MagicSchool for Students. While it is a separate platform from MagicSchool, users of the latter can access MagicSchool for Students and explore the options available for student use. This integration allows teachers to plan lessons and activities with the student-facing tools provided by MagicSchool for Students.
Tom’s Take: MagicSchool is an excellent platform for streamlining math lesson planning and content development. Innovative features like the Math Spiral Review Generator, Math Story Word Problem tool, and Table Analysis Generator showcase MagicSchool's unique capabilities.
The 2024 introduction of MagicSchool for Students expands the platform's value, enabling teachers to supervise students as they perform math and solidifying its position as an essential resource for educators in modern classrooms. That said, MagicSchool does not feature an advanced LLM, which makes it more prone to errors.
Price: MagicSchool offers limited free features, including lesson planning, differentiation, feedback and more. For unlimited usage and plus features the cost is $8.33/month, or$99.96 yearly.
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Eduaide: Math Tools
Eduaide is another powerful AI-driven lesson teaching assistant and plan generator full of handy resources for Math teachers. It is led by a practicing clsassroom teacher.
Features: Eduaide’s specialized resources for math teachers include “Real World Example,” which applies mathematical concepts to practical scenarios and STEM Project tool, designed to craft STEM activities and complete with critical thinking questions and a breakdown of STEM principles.
With Eduaide’s Content Generator, you can uncover Math resources for primary, secondary and postsecondary math classrooms. Eduaide offers Worksheet, an opportunity for students to practice math skills, and Intentional Mistakes, which prompts students to identify and revise errors.
The Lesson Seed, which offers ideas based on objectives, is the most popular resource to start lesson planning in Eduaide. Simply select the subject and level of your students and enter a topic, or keywords. Eduaide’s AI then generates a lesson plan with objectives, direct instruction, practice activities, and more.
Tom’s Take: Eduaide is a versatile lesson-planning platform, addressing a wide spectrum of educational needs and activities. Its capabilities extend beyond basic lesson creation, enabling educators to craft customized learning experiences through flexible, adaptable content modules. Yet, unlike MagicSchool, it does not offer student-facing tools.
Math instructors particularly benefit from Eduaide's specialized tools, including Real World Examples, STEM Projects, and Intentional Mistakes features. These resources facilitate the development of engaging, interactive math lessons that connect with students. The platform's adaptability empowers teachers to fine-tune lessons to their students' specific requirements, fostering a more impactful and immersive learning environment.
Price: Eduaide offers up to 15 generations a month. For unlimited access to all tools and resources you’ll pay $4.16/month, or $49.99/year.
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Khanmigo: Personalized Tutoring
Khanmigo, a product of Khan Academy, is an intelligent tutoring system designed to offer students personalized tutoring. While it also serves as an AI teaching assistant, it is primarily designed for student interaction.
Features: The Khan Academy was founded by Sal Khan, who began tutoring one of his cousins in mathematics and created short math lessons in the form of videos. The Khan Academy has since produced over 8,000 videos teaching a wide range of academic subjects.
Khanmigo is essentially a personal tutor, capable of understanding student queries and needs, and supplying students with relevant content and exercises. Khanmigo is designed to offer feedback and motivation and can adjust educational content in real time based on a student’s performance.
Khanmigo’s standout feature is its ability to guide students through the sequential steps or thought processes needed to solve a problem, rather than simply providing the answer. It encourages students to engage with the problem and reflect on their thinking.
In addition to assisting students, Khanmigo also aids teachers in lesson planning by providing AI-guided strategies and offers insightful feedback on student performance.
Tom’s Take: Khanmigo is an ideal tool for math teachers seeking to provide personalized, adaptive tutoring to their students. Its ability to guide learners through problem-solving steps and provide immediate feedback makes it a valuable resource for fostering mathematical proficiency and supporting students. Khanmigo features an advanced Large Language Model (LLM), but its LLM does make errors and its output should be evaluated.
Pricing: Khanmigo is free for U.S. teachers. Otherwise, an individual Khanmigo account is $9.99 a month. It can be expensive to equip all students with a Khanmigo account. Contact Khanmigo to get a quote for your students. Expect to be quoted based on the size of your department or institution.
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Sizzle: Step-by-Step Tutoring
Sizzle is a popular AI-driven learning app created by Jerome Pesenti, the former VP of AI at Meta. Sizzle offers a tailored approach to solving math equations and word problems.
Features: Sizzle guides students through each step of a problem as a tutor chatbot and assists users in correctly solving a problem.
The "Try a Different Approach" feature allows users to propose alternative methods for solving problems. The "Give Me Choices" option presents multiple answers, while the "Answer with a Photo" feature allows for image uploads. If you're stuck, you can ask Sizzle for a definition. Even if your handwriting is poor, Sizzle can decipher it.
Sizzle's problem-solving capabilities also extend to subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology, and economics, accommodating learners of all levels.
Tom’s Take: Sizzle is a valuable tool for math teachers seeking to provide personalized, adaptive support to their students. Its step-by-step guidance and ability to tailor instruction to individual needs make it a worth resource for fostering mathematical proficiency.
But it can be a little too easy to prompt Sizzle for an answer without going through all the necessary steps to solve the problem. Khanmigo is much better in this regard. That said, its adaptive learning capabilities make it a valuable resource for problem-solving and conceptual understanding. In addition, it’s free, while Khanmigo charges a lot to equip students with their app.
It holds a rating of 4.8 out of 5 on the App Store, signaling widespread user satisfaction.
Price: Sizzle is free.
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Wolfram Alpha: Computational Engine
Wolfram Alpha is an AI-driven computational knowledge engine that offers data analysis, answers factual questions, and resolves mathematical issues.
Features: Wolfram Alpha provides over 50,000 types of algorithms and equations. For teachers and students of physics, chemistry, and other sciences, it is an invaluable aide.
Wolfram Alpha performs a wide range of statistical operations and can analyze and generate reports, ranging from basic calculations to complex calculus. Wolfram Alpha can provide step-by-step explanations to a wide range of math problems. It can also plot graphs for almost any mathematical function, providing visual insights into equations and their properties.
Wolfram Alpha also provides dynamic calculators for many topics such as derivatives, integrals, limits, and matrices. In addition, it provides definitions and explanations for a vast array of mathematical terms and concepts.
Tom’s Take: Wolfram Alpha is an invaluable resource for math educators seeking to enhance their instruction with dynamic visualizations and interactive explanations of mathematical concepts. Its ability to provide step-by-step solutions and detailed explanations makes it an excellent tool for supporting student learning and fostering mathematical proficiency.
Teachers someimes compalin that Wolfram Alpha a bit clumsy to use. Fortunately, Wolfram GPT makes conversing with much Wolfram Alpha easier. The Wolfram Alpha GPT, available for free at ChatGPT, can respond to a wide variety of math and science questions and be used to verify calculations.
Price: Wolfram Alpha is free to use though there are paid options available.
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ChatGPT: Math Uses
ChatGPT is a conversational chatbot from OpenAI and can be a valuable tool for both teachers and students in the teaching and learning of math.
Features: ChatGPT can assist students with decimals and fractions, multiplication and division, pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, introduction to Statistics, Trigonometry, and Calculus. For one, ChatGPT can assist in explaining complex mathematical concepts in a simplified and understandable manner. It can generate diagrams or visual aids to further enhance math understanding. Teachers can use ChatGPT to generate math problem sets for practice and provide step-by-step solutions to enhance students' problem-solving skills.
For students, ChatGPT serves as a human-sounding conversational tutor that can provide instant feedback and clarification on difficult topics. Students can use ChatGPT to check their solutions to problems and converse about where they might have made mistakes. If leveraged effectively, ChatGPT can propel active learning, as students are engaging in a dialogue about the material.
Tom’s Take: ChatGPT is an incredibly versatile tool and also a low-pressure conversational environment for students looking to enhance their math learning abilities.It can break down complex mathematical concepts into easily digestible terms and offer instant feedback and clarification on problems that students struggle with. With ChatGPT as a study companion, students can build the confidence needed to tackle challenging problems on their own.
Yet, ChatGPT can also be used by students to cheat and circumvent problem-solving tasks. Students must be taught how to leverage ChatGPT effectively and ethically.
Price: The newest, fastest, and most advanced model is GPT-4o and it’s free to use, though some features may not be available to all. Many schools ban ChatGPT over privacy concerns, since user data is not protected.
The AI in Math Education Conundrum
How Can Teachers Navigate the Confusing Landscape of AI in Mathematics?
-Tom Daccord
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StepWiseMath: Intelligent Tutoring
StepWiseMath is an intelligent tutoring system that provides students with a personalized approach to learning math.
Features: StepWiseMath leverages AI to interact with students, understand their questions and needs, provide them with relevant content and exercises, and give them feedback and encouragement.
StepWiseMath brings AI to students on affordable mobile devices, giving students instant help 24×7 so they can master critical math skills.
Teachers can leverage StepWiseMath to provide additional support to students learning math. The information produced by StepWise informs data-driven teaching and learning and offers actionable reports for teachers.
Tom’s Take: User reviews are sparse, but the available feedback is generally positive. Students will appreciate the platform's ability to simplify complex math problems and appreciate the flexibility to learn at their own pace.
Price: You can work through up to 10 math problems for free. An individual student account is $9.99/month.
Contact StepWise Math for school pricing.
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Eduten: Digital Math
Eduten is a digital math platform from Finland designed for grades K-12 and beyond. Developed by one of Finland’s top universities, Eduten has spread to over 50 countries worldwide and is used by more than 1 million students.
Features: Created by teachers, for teachers, Eduten is based on Finnish pedagogy and is adaptable to any curriculum worldwide. It leverages gamification and is designed to keep students intrinsically motivated. Eduten’s program includes hundreds of high-quality tasks for students to build and improve their math skills. Eduten’s content library includes more than 200,000 gamified and varied tasks.
Eduten provides insightful learning analytics, useful differentiation, effective gamification, lesson planning support, and easy curriculum customization. Studies reportedly show that using Eduten, students solve up to 8 times more tasks compared to pen and paper.
Tom’s Take: Eduten Playground is a gamified and AI-based platform that provides scientifically base activities to boost learning results amd student motivation. Eduten Playground is reportedly the most popular digital math tool among Finnish teachers.
Pricing: Free four-week trial at your school. Contact Eduten for school pricing.
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Duolingo Math: Fun, Adaptive
Duolingo Math was launched in 2023 and aims to personalize Math learning.
Features: Duolingo Math follows what has made the Duolingo language learning app so successful: short, interactive exercises, AI personalization, and a fun, but challenging, atmosphere.
Duolingo Math offers bite-sized lessons and a gamified atmosphere to make math learning fun. Users can opt for beginner math, covering foundational topics, or intermediate math, emphasizing practical skills with more intricate exercises.
Tom’s Take: Duolingo Math is a fun interactive learning experience and adjusts the difficulty and sequence of math problems, to ensure that users are consistently challenged but not overwhelmed.
Reviews of Duolingo Math are positive, and users praise it for its enjoyable, interactive method of learning math. (I agree with that view!) However, some users have noted that the material can be a bit easy for high schoolers, recommending that more advanced content could be added in the future.
Price: Free with ads; paid options eliminate ads and add features.
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MathGPTPro: Swift and Interactive
MathGPTPro is an advanced AI-powered math tutor designed to offer swift and interactive solutions to math problems and facilitate a “progressive” learning experience.
Features: MathGPTPro is aimed at simplifying complex math challenges. Its key features include a user-friendly interface, AI-powered guidance for navigating through problems, and interactive exercises that promote an engaging learning environment.
MathGPTPro supports a wide array of mathematical topics, offering detailed, step-by-step solutions to enhance comprehension and problem-solving skills.
The platform aims to bridge the gap between mathematical complexity and accessibility, harnessing AI and mathematical expertise. Users can expect support in various areas such as equations, optimization problems, and more, tailored to their specific needs.
Tom’s Take: Teachers and students alike will appreciate MathGPT Pro’s ability to provide step-by-step solutions and detailed explanations for a wide range of math topics, from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus. Teachers can input specific concepts, questions, or problem types, and the tool will generate comprehensive, easy-to-understand explanations and examples. Reviews are sparse, but users are universally enthusiastic in their commentaries.
Price: Free for up to 10 tries. Basic account offers unlimited usage at $8.99/month.
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Socratic by Google AI
Socratic by Google is an AI-powered educational app designed to assist students and teachers.
Features: By simply taking a photo of their homework problem, students receive detailed explanations, step-by-step solutions, and relevant resources to help them understand the underlying concepts.
Futhermore, students can use their voice to ask for help on anything.
The app covers a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, science, literature, and more. Socratic's AI technology uses machine learning to recognize the problems and find the best solutions from a vast database of educational content.
Additionally, Socratic provides visual explanations and links to video tutorials to enhance understanding.
Tom’s Take: Socratic by Google provides clear explanations bound to help struggling students. It strikes me as especially beneficial for high school students who need immediate and reliable help with their assignments.
Judging by commentaries, users find Socratic by Google helpful and valuable and teachers describe finding “new ways” to teach students as a result. It is rated 4.9 out of 5 in the App Store based on 500,000 users.
Price: Free. Install the Socratic app on iOS or Android.
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Kahoot! DragonBox: Engage Kids
Kahoot! DragonBox is a collection of educational apps designed to make learning math fun and engaging for children.
Features: Each Kahoot! DragonBox app targets different aspects of math education, from basic number concepts to complex algebraic equations. These apps leverage interactive gameplay to capture children's interest and help foster a deeper understanding of math principles.
Here are three Kahoot! DragonBox offerings:
1-Kahoot! Multiplication: This app transforms the task of memorizing multiplication tables into an engaging game. It helps children ages 8 and up practice and master their times tables through interactive and fun challenges.
2-Kahoot! Numbers: This app, targeted at children ages 4-8, introduces young learners to the concept of numbers and their functions. It uses playful activities to help children understand the basics of numbers.
3-Kahoot! Big Numbers: Designed for ages 6-9, this app focuses on teaching long addition and subtraction through play and exploration. It helps children understand and practice these fundamental math operations in a fun and interactive environment.
Tom’s Take: Kahoot! DragonBox is ideal for personalized practice and problem-solving. Use it to build students’ foundational skills and conceptual understanding. To reinforce learning and keep students engaged, create interactive quizzes and challenges using Kahoot! Numbers.
Price: DragonBox, is available with a Kahoot! Kids subscription. Free to try for 7-days, then $9.99/mo. or $59.99/year.
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Maths.ai: Personal Tutoring
Maths.ai is an AI-powered platform designed to make math “cool” and assist with a wide range of mathematical problems.
Features: Maths.ai leverages AI to provide step-by-step solutions and offers explanations and relevant formulas in the process of solving mathematical problems.
Tom’s Take: Math.ai appears accurate and efficient and, if leveraged effectively, can be a valuable learning aid that can enhance student understanding and mathematics. It can help alleviate anxiety and discouragement when solving math problems. But some students may see it as way to get answers quickly. So Maths.ai should likely be used only as a supplement to othet eaching methods.
Price: Free, but in beta with a waitlist
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eSpark: Playful K-5 Math
eSpark uses generative AI to create differentiated and personalized supplemental curriculum resources for K-5 math and reading.
Features: eSpark activities are “playful” standards-based games, videos, and other interactive math and reading activities. eSpark leverages AI to tailor individual lessons to each students’ personal backgrounds and interests.
Each activity within eSpark is aligned with state standards, ensuring that students are practicing skills relevant to their grade level. Additionally, eSpark offers formative assessments embedded in activities. Finally, eSpark also provides teachers with detailed reports on individual and class-wide performance
Tom’s Take: eSpark has typically received high online ratings from teachers though some express a desire for deeper content.
Price: Contact eSpark for institution pricing.
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Squirrel AI: Adaptive Tutoring
Squirrel Ai Learning is a Chinese K12 edtech company specializing in intelligent adaptive education. It provides a personalized learning plan and one-on-one tutoring in Math, and other subjects.
Features: Squirrel AI uses generative AI to customize lessons and practice problems based on each student’s unique learning profile. It breaks down a subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is subdivided into over 10,000 atomic elements, with the goal to identify gaps in understanding as precisely as possible.
Tom’s Take: Squirrel AI appears to have a lot of brainpower behind it and financial backing. Squirrel AI has research agreements with well-regarded institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and UC-Berkeley etc.
Price: Contact Squirrel AI for institution pricing.
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Mapify: Visualize Connections
Mapify, formerly ChatMind, is an innovative AI-powered mind mapping tool designed to streamline and enhance your brainstorming and project management experience.
Features: Mapify transforms your questions, articles, or data into a comprehensive mind map with just a click. The tool offers context rewriting and dialogue expansion features, allowing for a more in-depth exploration of ideas. It also provides functionalities for framework sorting, brainstorming, project management, schedule arrangement, and note-taking, making it a versatile tool for various tasks.
Tom’s Take: Math students can greatly benefit from Mapify. The tool’s dialogue expansion feature can help explain complex mathematical formulas and equations in a step-by-step manner. Moreover, the mind maps can help visualize mathematical concepts and their relationships, making abstract mathematical ideas more tangible. The tool can also assist in organizing and structuring mathematical proofs, making them easier to understand and follow.
Moreover, the bookmarking feature allows students to save important URLs for later reference, facilitating efficient study and research.
Price: One Free credit a month. Basic account is $5.99/month.
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Elicit AI: Math Research Assistant
Elicit AI is an advanced research assistant that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate research workflows. It is designed to help users navigate and understand relevant research articles in-depth.
Features: Elicit AI can find pertinent math papers without relying on exact keyword matches and extract key information from these papers to answer user’s questions. It also synthesizes evidence and arguments, designs research plans, and evaluates interventions.
One standout feature is how Elicit helps you extract intricate details and organize them into a clear table, simplifying the analysis.
Tom’s Take: For upper-level math students, Elicit can help students navigate and understand complex mathematical research papers, extracting key information and answering questions about mathematical concepts, theories, and proofs. The tool’s ability to design research plans can also aid students in planning and executing their math projects or assignments. Moreover, Elicit AI’s intervention evaluation feature can help students understand the practical applications of mathematical concepts.
Price: Try for free and receive 5,000 credits. Basic account is $10/month, which includes 12,000 credits a month.
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Symbolab: AI Powered Calculator
Symbolab is a versatile and user-friendly platform for solving a wide range of mathematical problems.
Features: Symbolab covers subjects from pre-algebra to advanced calculus, and it is particularly useful for its interactive graphing tools, and comprehensive practice problems.
Symbolab is valuable for its ability to help students understand complex mathematical concepts through detailed explanations and visual tools. It is suitable for all education levels, from middle school to university.
Tom’s Take: Symbolab is intuitive, provides clear explanations, and offers a robust set of features that support students and educators in solving and understanding mathematical problems.
That said, all solution steps are not available to free users.
Price: Limited free features, inluding practice problems. Pro plan, which includes all solutions, costs $2.49 a month.
Tom’s Tips:
1.AI and Complex Math
Complex Math has been challenging for AI, but Google’s Alpha Geometry is now capable of solving geometry problems at the level of an International International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalist. And the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expects that AI will soon master its international assessment of adults' numeracy and problem solving skills. In all, AI can increasingly master math content with human-like reasoning skills, so the focus for teachers must be on how to teach mathematical thinking.
2. AI and Problem Solving
AI tools can solve math problems and provide the correct steps, but they don’t always help students with the process of mathematical thinking. That said, some AI tools are getting better at prompting students to think through mathematical problems and don’t quickly divulge the answer to a math problem. Khanmigo and Sizzle are two examples of AI tools that attempt to guide students through each step of a math problem and help them persevere. Though not perfect, AI is improving quickly in this regard.
3. Personalized Tutoring
One of the greatest potential uses of AI is personalized tutoring. There is much hope that large language models such as GPT can serve as scalable, personalized tutors in mathematics and other subjects. One recent study found that LLM-based explanations of math problems “positively impacted learning” relative to seeing only correct answers. Teachers can leverage AI to help students understand mathematical concepts, and even create mathematical models, processes that are crucial to nurturing mathematical thinking.
Tom’s Suggested Resources
Math Education with Large Language Models: Peril or Promise? - SSRN
AI Can Solve an Algebra Equation in Seconds. Here’s How Math Teachers Can Adapt - Education Week
Inside AlphaGeometry: Google DeepMind’s New Model that Solves Geometry Problems Like a Math Olympiad Gold-Medalist - Jesus Rodriguez
Using AI to Encourage Productive Struggle in Math - Edutopia
AI Lesson Plan Tools for K-12 Math and Science Teachers - Tom Daccord
GPT-4 Can Solve Math Problems. But Not in All Languages - Yennie Jun
Technology & Math Instruction: 10 Charts - Education Week
AI Lesson Plan Generators: Considerations & Recommendations - Tom Daccord
A Teacher’s Guide to AI Prompts - Tom Daccord
How to Teach With AI: A Teacher’s Guide to Grading Student Work With AI - Tom Daccord
From Fear to Fascination: Adapting to ChatGPT in Education - Tom Daccord
Artificial intelligence is already changing how teachers teach - Washington Post