Classroom 2050: Unleashing AI, XR, Gaming

0:00The situation is not good and a lot of people blame the pandemic but it was pretty bad before the pandemic. The kids in school today are growing up into a world that's incredibly fast -paced and it's complex. I think a common misconception is that technology is going to replace the pedagogy and it's not. Many parents are thinking differently about what learning looks like, learning on a continuum, different experiences. In Minecraft, they're like figuring out who they are as a human. Like if they're the person playing with their friends who's organizing the mission, maybe they're going to grow up to be a leader.

0:35It is not a clear path to classroom 2050, so we have to be able to hold the optimism and hope and boldness. It's like the holodeck on Star Trek, and I honestly didn't think that was going to happen in my lifetime. I think that's going to happen in the next five years. I know this kind of was called the Crossroom of 2050, but I actually want to be very clear. It's a Classroom in 2023. It's happening right now. The year is 2023, and so much has changed in the last 50 years when it comes to technology. We now have smartphones that can fit in our pockets. We have the world's knowledge accessible to anyone with an internet connection and even tools that summarize incredibly complex concepts in the voice of our favorite fictional characters.

1:20Now, reflect on the state of the classroom, the very forum where we raise the next generation. How is that evolved during the same time period? Despite so many children actively using cutting -edge technologies like AI, XR, and gaming outside the classroom, those technologies haven't made their way in. And this episode explores why that is, especially given the learning loss we saw prior to and during COVID. and how these technologies just might help us radically upgrade the classroom of the future. This episode was actually recorded live at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which I got to attend for the first time recently, and I was joined by four guests with such unique backgrounds.

2:06The first was Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, which recently unveiled Khan Migo, an AI powered tutor. We also had an Arupa Gangouli. She is the founder of Prism's We Are, which is using VR to better teach children math and science through spatial reasoning. We also had Allison Matthews, head of Minecraft education, who's tailoring the world's most popular game to empower and teach young people skills from coding to active citizenship. And finally, we had Romy Drucker, director of the education program at the Walton Family Foundation, who has a unique bird's eye view of the challenges and opportunities in the space, also previously serving in leadership roles at the New York City Department of Education.

2:51I really wish I grew up in an era where these technologies were at my fingertips. So let's not squander this unique opportunity.

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3:34Welcome everyone, welcome to Classroom 2050, welcome to our Classroom for the next 50 minutes. I'd love to just start by getting a pulse from the room. How many of you are excited about new technologies like AI, XR, extended reality, gaming? Let's put your hands up. Who's excited? Great. Now, how many of you? Keep your hands up and then put them down. How many of you feel like these technologies have successfully made it into the classroom for the better? Put your hand down if you don't think they've made it there. Keep it up. I only see a few hands still up there. But luckily we have some wonderful founders today who are working on exactly that problem, figuring out how we elevate the classroom after it's been relatively stagnant, quite frankly, for many years.

4:22All right, so this is going to be an amazing panel. And to kick things off, let's really ground ourselves on where we are. Romi, maybe you can help us here. What is the data saying in terms of the student experience? What are kids really facing? How can we really get a better understanding of that? Thank you so much, Steph, for being here and moderating this discussion. As many of you know, the pandemic was a huge setback in education, and it exacerbated and widened already deep inequities. We know from data that came out last week that math achievement levels are the lowest they've been in this country since 1990.

5:0090 and literacy achievement levels are the lowest they've been since 2004 and the pandemic erased two decades of progress that we had made in education through a variety of different change initiatives. So we have a lot of work to do. The good news is that students, families and educators agree that this is a moment for reimagining learning, both embracing technology but also thinking about how we strengthen in relationships and classrooms, how we better support student wellbeing to address the mental health crisis. Thank you, Romy. And, Aruba, I wanna move to you. What will it take specifically to develop the next generation of STEM talent?

5:45I know you have some data there, give us a grounding there in terms of what that will really take and what we're seeing up until now. Absolutely. I discovered that the top indicators of success in post -secondary STEM is number one, your ability to think spatially. The Soviets had first discovered it in 1970, so if you kind of think about a rough definition, it's the ability to rotate 3D objects in your mind and maintain perspective of that object. The second top indicator of success in post -secondaryism is your ability to abstract. And when I say abstract, I don't mean looking at word problems, talking, drawing diagrams and visualizations, creating charts and tables and creating equations because those are all 2D representations of thought.

6:21Abstraction is Isaac Newton. Can you see under a tree and Apple fell? He's like, whoa, how do I describe language, which notation and build mathematical models of this physical experience. So I started prisons three years ago to scale these best practice methodologies. How do you immerse children in problems in the first person? Create the intellectual need for why they have to learn something and then through building a solution to that problem, learn the math and science that you need to. So how does prisons work? We utilize virtual reality. The students put their VR headsets on, their mobile VR headsets, and their transport it to a, it is my mission and commitment that when kids see math problems in math class, they should not be like, that's not a real problem.

6:59No one really important to actually solving it. They should go, I heard that in the news. I know absolutely that very smart people are working on this building mathematical identities from a very young agent's belief that I can contribute to the mathematical sciences. So that through line of going from physicality, simulations, data visualizations, chart tables, equations is really scalable. It's most of secondary math and science. So we've built out all of algebra one geometry, middle school math, algebra two precalculus. We'll be pushing into Olive Hi -Red very soon. When we put out math, we got teachers, we're clamoring.

7:30So we put out all of biology, chemistry, physics, middle school life sciences. And we're going to keep building. This has really been built on the backs of teachers and in collaboration in school systems. So I'm happy to kind of share more. We have so much to dig into there. And by the way, we didn't have a chance to call this out. But there's many ways that people learn. And instead of talking about the technologies that these wonderful founders are building, we wanted to make sure you had a glimpse into really what we're talking about here. And so we've talked about different technologies. So this is a glimpse into VR.

7:59One of the other technologies entering the classroom is AI, one of the topics of the year. So Sal, why don't you talk to us about what you're building there? And of course, we'll also pull up some of the technology that you're building. Yeah, so kind of kind of he's been around a little while now, and most folks associate us with videos, but most of our resources have been around personalized practice. But I'm kind of a traditionalist and a progressive where I say, but there's also just gaps in students' foundations. The number of times that I've gone to a seventh grade math classroom, this was recent, I was in the Bronx.

8:27They're working on Khan Academy, the kids were doing exponents, and it was like something to the third to the seventh power, so it's to the 21st power, three times seven. I saw an eighth grader grab a calculator for that. I literally slapped their hand, I'm not sure if you're allowed to do that. But I slapped their hand, I'm like, what's three times seven? And I saw the eighth grader start to do this. And that's just a very basic example of like there's massive fluency gaps in students and it's causing too much cognitive load. So that's where Khan Academy started. is hey can we get people as much practice, learn at their own time and pace, your teacher with 30 kids, but there is a way that all 30 kids can go to different paces.

8:58You at a teacher can understand where the kids are. And the students have multiple shots at goal in order to understand those underlying skills. That's what we've been working on for 10 plus years. And I'm happy to talk more about it, but we're seeing some very promising results, pre -AI. But then last summer, open AI reaches out to us. This is obviously months before chat, GPT and all of that. and they said, hey, we're training our next generation model, was GPT -4. When chat GPT came out, it was based on GPT 3 .5. I was skeptical, because I had been paying attention to previous generations of these models.

9:31But when we started playing with GPT -4, we said, this one's different. This one, you can actually get it to act as a tutor. It still had issues around hallucinations, which is when the AI just makes up facts. It still has, that is the technical term for it. It had issues when it came to math, which obviously, you know, we don't only do math, but math is very close to our heart and it's gotta be accurate. And we were worried about guardrails. And what if students do use it for negative things or they go into some type of weird rabbit hole? So we said, can we put guardrails around it? So we started working pretty aggressively.

10:03We were under NDA with OpenAI since last summer. Then chat GPT came out and we weren't going to launch our thing until the GPT -4 launch in March. And I remember telling Greg Barkman, like, hey, I thought we were waiting. He was like, no, chat GPT is nothing new. It was just a chat interface on top of GPT 3 .5. And that captured everyone's imagination. And it kind of immediately put a bit of a bomb into the education system where everyone was like, oh, kids are going to use this to cheat, write their essays. And by the way, it's bad at math and it makes up things, et cetera, et cetera. I was initially bummed because like, what we're working on, what I think is a reasonably thoughtful solution here.

10:39Now, this thing just gets thrown out into the universe. And everyone's first impression is going to be AI plus education is really bad. And hindsight, I actually think that was a blessing, because what it did is it forced people to grapple with some real things. When we first saw GPT -4 months before chat GPT, we were like, oh yeah, people are gonna be able to use this to write essays. People are gonna be able to use this to do college s, you know, do their homework, et cetera. How do we mitigate these risks? But the fact that chat GPT within a month or two, 40 % of teachers were using this very imperfect tool for themselves, for things like lesson planning.

11:10And students were already using it, but it was forcing the issue on the education. Most of ed tech is things are okay. Maybe we could just technology to make it better, but this was like, wow, things just got broken. We need to do something to make it better. So we launched our implementation, which we call Kahn Migo on Kahn Academy. There's two headlines here is one is, we think this is the beginning of a journey of, we've always tried to approximate personal tutoring at Kahn Academy through videos and exercises, but I think generative AI kind of jumped us forward 20 years faster than I thought.

11:43If you would ask me a year ago where it can act as a tutor and maybe just as interestingly act as a teaching assistant to help generate lesson plans, help refresher teachers knowledge, create rubrics, etc. etc. These are real kids in Newark, New Jersey who are using Conmigo and in that last green you just saw it was actually in Spanish as well. It works in every major language which by itself already solves a major issue where you can be doing your work in English but get help in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish and Vietnamese whatever language you need that help in. It does not cheat. If you ask a conmigo, hey, tell me the answer.

12:19It will not tell you the answer, but say I'm your tutor. It'll act socratic and say, well, what do you think is the next step? We've done a bunch. I, unless you all want to, I won't go into all the details, but it's substantially better. I won't say perfect, but substantially better at math than what you would get just out of the box with GPT -4. All conversations are monitorable by parents and teachers, which we thought was an important guardrail. and then we have a second AI that monitors the conversations. And if it looks like it's going into a weird place, self -harm, hate speech, whatever, the AI will actively notify the parents and teachers to do that.

12:52And so we think this is the beginning. There's a lot coming. We're giving it memories. So it can have a long -lasting interactions with the teachers and students, ways that it reports back to the teachers so it can summarize things. We're adding speech. Both founders so far have talked about maybe how we're early on, there are misconceptions, misperceptions from whether it's students, teachers, people in school boards about welcoming this technology. So I want to get into those conversations too. But Allison, please give us a glimpse into the world of gaming, because that is a form of technology that has immense growth as well, just like AI and extended reality, but maybe isn't met with the same level of open arms.

13:34So we'd love to hear what you're building. Yeah, for sure. Minecraft is an immersive 3D virtual space that's filled with beautiful biomes and all kinds of animals. So Minecraft education. We built on top of that wildly popular video game a powerful teaching and learning platform by putting safety, security, privacy features that educators need and parents expect on top, as well as an in -game library that's full of learning experiences from learning to code and math, history, literacy, but all the way to learning how to be a more active citizen or learning about climate change. So why would we do this?

14:21Because we know, and maybe you do too, that video games are one of the most powerful ways to engage a person in a deeply engaging, deeply immersive experience. And it lights up intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is just that desire to keep trying to go deeper to learn more because you love it. You're having fun. You're passionate about it. So I'll give you an example. I was in the kitchen. Maybe you can relate to this a little bit. Then the kitchen with my two teenage boys. And I just dropped a fact that I had learned I had memorized in school about the moon phases. My boys both looked at me deeply confused and in a few minute conversation that involved plates and a flashlight, they helped me understand that this fact that I had memorized in school was completely wrong.

15:14So how did they understand this more deeply than me? Because certainly I didn't teach them. It's because they were playing a video game where they needed to build a rocket that had to be able to orbit the moon and in order for the rocket to orbit the moon, they had to understand space science. And so they were motivated to learn about space science and all of the factors that are involved in it because they wanted to win this game. And so that is the power of game based learning. Amazing. And I'm going to go to you next with these misconceptions partially because Ann Aruba is actually a previous educator herself.

15:53And so tell us a little bit more about maybe the way that people view the introduction of these technologies, whether it be VR, but also AI, also gaming. And where maybe some of those assumptions may be misplaced. Yeah, I think a common misconception is that technology is going to replace the pedagogy, and it's not. Pedagogy is pedagogy, and so what the tech will allow you to do is it will scale that. You are building an elementary school building in India that creates a shaded region. You're building a satellite that does XYZ and to do that thing, you have to learn ratios. you have to apply a linear functions.

16:26And so what I've learned is that instead of talking about the technology, talk about the learning design. And when you're focused on the learning design, whether it's a powerful AGI tool or game design, or in my case, spatial computing, that is just fueling a way of teaching and learning. And when you project it in that manner, nobody pushes back. Like I have 100 % of teachers opting in to our program. And that might seem like, are you sure on a Rupa? Like everyone's a little bit afraid of VR. And no, because in my deck, you don't see VR anywhere. So that's the first thing that I would say is a key misconception is it's not about the technology.

16:58The technology powers a learning design. And the second thing that I would say was it is then, therefore, incumbent upon those who are building learning solutions to over -index on training teachers in the pedagogy and not the tech. We focus too much time on let me teach you about how to utilize this hardware. No, we're going to spend 30 seconds on that because you're actually very smart. And you know how to do it. You just need to have that confidence. and we're going to spend the market share of the time on lesson study, intellectual preparation, job -embedded coaching, how do you get learning outcomes?

17:28So I would say, kind of, that's where my mind, too, in terms of the main misconception that a bow that I would tie on that is, there's been this feeling and perception that school systems are regressive, and there's somehow contrast to progress. When you show them how it standards aligned, how you teach bell to bell in a 50 minute instructional episode, how you prepare for it, you're not going to get any pushback. It's just kind of showing them how you go from point A to point B. So maybe you can comment on that. You already touched on some ideas where there is this assumption that with AI in the classroom, every student is going to use it to cheat.

17:58They're never going to learn again because why would they? They've got this assistant who can do it for them. So maybe just speak to that directly. What are you seeing in terms of maybe the reality or what can be designed to maybe construe that reality? Yeah, I think chat GBT has forced folks into one of two modes. either have some assignments where you just say, use whatever help you want. And that's reasonable, because we now use it in the workplace, et cetera. There's another mode even, without technology, everyone said, okay, I guess we're gonna have to do more in class proctoring now, things like that.

18:28I think both of those are probably part of the mix. One of the things we're trying to do, we think actually the most power happens when the AI works with the student. So in a couple of months, we're gonna be launching something and we're gonna initially do it for college essays, which is a whole other, this is the first college admission cycle in the chat G .B .T .R. So it's gonna be very interesting. But we've created activities where it can interview the student and help surface things that would make for good college essay. So brainstorm with the student, not for the student, a modality where you can write an essay of any kind and then ask for feedback from the AI.

19:01We've all seen technologies that can help with your grammar and things like that. But once again, not just tell you this is how to write it grammatically correct, but say, hey, look at your verb tense again. like once again act like a tutor, but now with generative AI, especially with GPT -4, it can really go into the argument that you're making and how do you make it more motive and how do you really make it an excellent paper. And what's interesting about that is when you work with the AI and all of the interactions are logged, a teacher can actually not just introspect on the final outcome, they can introspect on the process.

19:32So we're building a mechanism right now where the teacher can assign through the AI. Hey, I want everyone in my 11th grade AP American history course to write a paper on how the world would have been different if the American Revolution didn't happen to me. I don't know. Something. And then every student will be able to work on it with Konmigo. And Konmigo will be like, okay, do you think that really backs up your argument? How about this? They're riffing together, which I think will be a better experience for a lot of students. And then even while that's happening, the teacher will be able to talk to Konmigo.

20:01It's like, okay, what's everyone up to? And says, okay, I've already started to, you know, this student is doing great. The student seems kind of stuck. This student just copied and pasted something in there. I don't know where it came from. We might want to double click on that. Maybe they're using chat GPT. And I think then all of a sudden you've kind of addressed this issue where now the artificial intelligence not only do you not have to worry about policing it in the same way can help students write better, it can give teachers better feedback. You know a lot of mastery learning is multiple shots at goal.

20:29If you're at a certain level 80 percent you should try again. You should be able to write it but writing it's very hard to get feedback. But now the AI can give multiple rounds and then also give the teacher first pass of like you know based on the rubric We created together. I'd give the student a four out of five on that dimension a five out of five on that dimension So I think that's probably where we're gonna go. By the way, this isn't crazy I did a year of exchange in Sweden and they have a totally different grading system Including you can submit an assignment and you can pass or fail and if you fail They tell you what to change they tell you how to get better So this is not like completely, you know, grown out of AI and totally new.

21:05These concepts do exist elsewhere. We've been doing that in our lab school with humans, but it's more resource -sensitive. Exactly. Allison, actually, that dovetails perfectly into this idea that if we are introducing these technologies, what is the future of a teacher or teachers in general? How does that role evolve? And then also, if you have time, I'd love to just hear your take on how people view gaming because that's a very interesting topic on its own. Yeah, so Minecraft education is now in 119 countries, and we've got millions of players every month, and a big focus of the team is on connecting with educators.

21:38So we can understand what are the problems that they're trying to solve. And one of them is similar to what Sal was talking about in that in any given classroom, you're gonna have a full range of readiness for whatever the course material is that's being covered. And so what teachers really need is a tool that enables differentiated learning. So a way that someone who totally understands the content can take it further, and someone who's, it's new to them, they haven't understood this before, can start to get familiar with the materials. And to your question of the role of the teacher, because the game supports, we've got scaffolded learning experiences in the game, which means, if you're stuck, if you don't know Minecraft, or if you don't really understand the lesson, We've got little things built into the lessons that can help give you tips or clues on how to move forward.

22:29So students can be self -directed in that way, which frees the teacher up to actually work with the students who need more attention or to challenge the students who are racing ahead. So that's one. I wanted to point out one other thing for teachers, because we've had a lot of teachers, especially early on, tell us, the kids love this game. Why would I bring this into the classroom? I'm gonna lose control immediately. They all understand it better than I do. So, yes, this is true. And none of us as adults will ever understand Minecraft as well as the average eight year old. This is just a fact.

23:04And so what that requires is a mindset shift, right? The kids in school today are growing up into a world that's incredibly fast paced and it's complex. So they need mindset that's going to enable them to be successful in a world that's changing rapidly. So they need to build a growth mindset. They need to build leadership skills, collaboration, communication skills. And these are sort of those higher -order things that can be achieved through playing a game. And by students being immersed in this game stoked to be there having so much fun, The teacher then has the ability, instead of trying to keep students on task, the teacher has the ability to generate some of these conversations in the classroom about, tell me why you did that in the game.