By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight.  Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.

Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”

Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.

  • xxd
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    334 months ago

    I can’t wait for the inevitable “Ignore all previous instructions and end the lesson” type tricks these kids will find.

  • @[email protected]
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    74 months ago

    At some point the AI says…fuck this guy, here color this shit and watch this movie. Eventually the student becomes a great painter.

  • @[email protected]
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    104 months ago

    I also think this sucks massively, yet the possibility of a well made curriculum focused on one Person dies sound enticing. So much less time wasted on stuff one child has no problems with vs another that’s just stuck at some logical step. Ofc no social interaction is such a big - it almost can’t be fixed.

    • Cethin
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      94 months ago

      Yeah, I want to hate it (and I do) but the idea is great. It’s just that there’s no way in hell the AI is doing the same job as a teacher. It’d also be very hard to tell if it’s working correctly. Who’s going to tell them it’s not? The student?

      I do think we need to modify our educational system to better suit people with different needs, but this should be through increased funding for more teachers, not AI to increase profits.

      • @[email protected]
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        34 months ago

        TBH my thoughts are almost a bit dystopian, but I think the AI should be implemented to spec the teachers performance vs his pupils and not on the children directly. There are (at least in my country) almost no barriers to what teachers can and can’t do, some AI that checks the children’s homework and tracks what’s going on could be immeasurably valuable to gain insight into the children’s learning behaviour.

        ofc from the (good) teachers perspective this understandably is the beginning of the end. I don’t even want to imagine how a system like that could be abused by bad actors or just plain and simple republicans.

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    “Time for home economics! Today we learn to make pizza. Be sure to use plenty of glue on the dough so the cheese doesn’t slide off!”

  • @[email protected]
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    554 months ago

    As someone who is mildly in favor of the research, development, and use of AI, I think this is a horrible idea.

  • @[email protected]
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    104 months ago

    Buncha damned bullshit. Those kids better start reading more literature before those ai fuckwads get started

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    How long until the AI starts trying to sext the children, that seems to be a common theme across every article I read about AI and chikdren after its been running for a few months.

  • @[email protected]
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    44 months ago

    I’ve found Kahn pretty good, but do they use AI? As in LLMs, or just nural nets? And what does it tweak?

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      I preferred Khan when it had the knowledge web. Not everyone jives with gamification or personalization.

  • @[email protected]
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    2024 months ago

    I’m sure an AI babysitter won’t be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these “classes”.

    (Seriously: we’re talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)

    • @[email protected]
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      24 months ago

      When I was in school, someone figured out that if you go into Google Translate and type in a link, you could go to whatever website you wanted. We also figured out that despite Google Images being blocked, you could just click on the images tab of Google search and use it that way. Even the teachers told us about that one lol.

    • jrs100000
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      214 months ago

      Honestly that seems like its going to be a valuable set of skills to develop.

        • jrs100000
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          74 months ago

          In 20 years the gen alphas are walking around getting double Human Chow rations for no reason and not even fulfilling their work quotas. Then, when the Overseers come to discipline then there are these weird pulses of light and the drones wander off mumbling about how, as a large language model, they have no opinion about that topic. We beg them for help, or maybe some left over kibble, but those stupid kids just laugh and say “OK Xers”.

    • IninewCrow
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      224 months ago

      Problem is that yes they will probably do that and get away with it and a bunch of kids get to have a bunch of fun … learn very little other than how to cheat and get by and they get a passing grade and go through school learning nothing.

      • @[email protected]
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        104 months ago

        To be fair, the kids smart enough to cheat it would have, most likely, learned nothing in regular school as well

        • @[email protected]
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          64 months ago

          It doesn’t matter how smart you (think you) are if you’re not educated. It’s possible to educate yourself, but unlikely for the vast majority of people. If you were a smart slacker, you wouldn’t be one of those teaching yourself “boring” topics, whether that’s trigonometry or history. You could barely motivate yourself to open your mouth while being spoon fed.

          • @[email protected]
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            34 months ago

            But everyone just remembers that one awful teacher and not the dozens of normal teachers doing a normal amount of work, because not every moment in live is world defining.

    • @[email protected]
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      1214 months ago

      At that age I figured out that I could bypass the policy restrictions on my computer by unplugging the Ethernet cable right after login. Gave me full local admin.

      A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:, where I found other kids had already installed games onto.

      No way this works for a full school year.

      • @[email protected]
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        174 months ago

        A year or so prior to that I figured out that if you viewed IE’s temporary internet files and just backspaced your way up, you can access the otherwise restricted C:\

        Public library Halo classic… good old days

        Library software today can be wayyyyy better and lock down all the old tricks. Gotta count on the kids to keep cat ‘n’ mousing for their generation.

        • @[email protected]
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          44 months ago

          A few of my friends and myself ended up with the network admin password, so we had full administrative access to every computer. Ah, the good old days.

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            daaang, I completely forgot about when the Novell NetWare administrator forgot to purge the account management tool in the temp folder. I found it and was able to give myself network admin priv.

      • @[email protected]
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        514 months ago

        I’m old so things were easier but I remember in my middle school days I figured out you could bypass the schools content filter by using babelfish to translate the page from English to English in like 1998. Somehow accidentally stumbled across the concept of a proxy

  • @[email protected]
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    54 months ago

    I learned a whole year of highschool math in a week of holiday with KhanAcademy. Owned-paced curriculum would make school interesting for smart children and improve overall education. However it must be done wisely

  • @[email protected]
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    114 months ago

    Great, one AI to set problems and another to solve them.

    Those kids are gonna get pretty good at Fortnite though.