Strategy

The strategy that I implemented was creating an AI tutor bot named NUMY. This tutor bot was designed to help students who are struggling in math. I noticed in my class that after teaching a lesson and then having students work on the handout, students tend to get lost or have no idea on how to begin the problem in the worksheet. With NUMY, this tutor bot provided an additional support for students to help with their thinking when solving math problems. My class runs for 1hr and 40 min. Depending on the topic, I would take up to 30 min to teach, then 30 min for students to work on the handout and then I would review by having students come up to the board and work on the problems assigned to them. My AI Bot NUMY was used during the 30 minute handout session. Students would get a handout with a few problems. For the first problem I would ask them on a scale of 1-5 of how they felt about the problem. 1 meaning they are very confused, 5 meaning they know how to solve the problem. Then from there I would ask them to write what they already know and write 1-3 questions they have about the problem. This was to help them brainstorm on where they can begin. From there, if students knew how to solve the problem, I would let them solve it. If they had trouble with the problem, there was a QR code in the handout for the students to scan with their phone to access NUMY. Once they were done with the problem, I would ask them to rate how they felt about the problem after using NUMY. This yielded data to show if using NUMY was effective in improving student understanding of the math concept or not.

Documentation

Student Activity Data

Be Real With It Survey Results

These are the results of the survey I gave to my class about their overall experience with using NUMY.

Analysis

I think this strategy was effective. I saw many students accessing NUMY, using it as a guide to help them with their problem as I walked around the classroom. I think seeing the students use NUMY live addressed my PoP because students were into their work; they didn’t really ask me questions about the problem. Also the self-rating data shows improvement on their learning (unless the students were lying). This strategy enhanced students' learning so that they were able to solve the remaining math problems on the handout. Some still used NUMY for reference, others continued without it. Also, I think many students liked NUMY, they found NUMY’s response funny and very sarcastic. A few of my students asked if NUMY represented my own sarcasm.

My predictions on how this AI Bot would turn out was 50/50, because I wasn’t sure if everyone had working wifi on their phone to access NUMY and I was unsure if they actually used my tutor bot or used a different AI tool instead. When I looked at the data and survey, I was shocked because I didn’ t realize how helpful my AI Tutor Bot was to my students. I saw much positive feedback from those who did use NUMY. I saw a few negative comments as well. A few students just wanted to get to the answer, but NUMY proceeded step by step, asking questions along the route. I also saw that a few of my struggling students understand the problems better now versus when they started.

I had a few challenges and failed attempts:

First was getting NUMY to actually work. I initially used copilot to create NUMY and even though my class has access to it, they still could not get the link to work. So then I had to create NUMY in ChatGPT which was more effective and easy to access.

Another challenge I had was that a couple of students who did use NUMY experienced a negative impact on their learning. They thought NUMY’s step by step was too long and confusing. So that’s when I decided to tweak NUMY, making it a better AI tutor Bot. So now NUMY is NUMY 2.0.

Another challenge I faced was the lack of adequate class time. There were some topics like solving rational equations for example where it took students a long time to do 1 or 2 problems.

If I had to change anything it would probably be NUMY. I always need to make adjustments to ensure that it’s suitable for different learning styles. I would also try to improve my data collection. It was just a lot to take pictures of everyone's work and then collect the data and manually input it in excel. It was easier when I had it assigned as homework because then students could upload their chat with NUMY in Brightspace. Because I did this live in class, I had to collect and do it manually.