The landscape of learning is constantly changing these days. While technology may be playing a role in almost everything, education may be among the fields seeing the most dramatic shift.
First came the internet. Now comes AI.
Austin startup LearnWith.AI Inc. is hoping to find the right mixture of tech and old school facts to give students a new way to learn. The company, which has ties to private grade schools Alpha Schools and GT School, recently launched an app that it hopes will make learning extra sticky by using elements of AI and social media to help capture students' attention and pass AP tests.
Samy Aboel-Nil, chief operating officer of GT School, said the new app, called TeachTap, is the culmination of piles of research and deep conversations among educators and technologists hoping to find a better way to help students learn. They asked themselves a relatively straightforward set of questions: What motivates kids to do well on AP tests? What do they like to spend their time on?
The answer: Scrolling TikTok on an iPhone.
"Something about it makes kids love it," Aboel-Nil said. "What if we take whatever that is, and we combine it with education and learning and content? And we use this new disruptive technology of genealogy AI to make that all happen? That set us in the direction of TeachTap. It quacks and looks like TikTok, but we use Gen AI to create educational content."
One of the startup's first ideas was to use historical figures, such as Ben Franklin and George Washington, to teach AP history.
"All the stuff they're doing is entertaining, but it's teaching them everything they need to know for the AP U.S. history test," Aboel-Nil said. "And then we incorporate practice tests and study guides. So it's everything from learning it in this fun style with comments and likes and shares and all that kind of stuff. And you can do it one-handed in the backseat of your car or at the doctor's office."
While GT School Inc. and Alpha Schools are based in Austin, the LearnWith.AI app is used by students worldwide. The app is free to download, although it has in-app purchases. The courses include AP U.S. history, world history, biology, geography and an SAT prep course. Most of them provide one learning unit for free but charge for the full course.
The app's AI-generated content is reviewed by educators and developed to target the curriculum students are tested on. That makes it a more efficient learning tool than more general AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, which may provide a ton of relevant information, including a lot of things that students won't necessarily need for their tests, Aboel-Nil said.
The LearnWith.AI product development team has grown to about 40 people who work on TeachTap, Magic Academy, a gamified team-building app and a reading app that will launch soon.
Kids, around second to sixth grade, will be able to use the new reading app to build their own stories using generative AI. They can pick their favorite topics and choose who the characters will be. The app generates a story at the users grade level, writes the story, adds images and tests the students on the content of the story.
"If you want to make something that kids love to read, give them a hand in it, make it exciting," he said. "Let them create these crazy mash-up stories that are what they asked for. And maybe they'll want to read more."
And that's the general idea behind LearnWith.AI's other concepts in development.
"It's kind of like getting kids to eat their spinach, but we're putting enough sugar on it that we're making spinach tastes like candy," he said. "That's a tall order."
And, just like the broader education realm, the startup plans to continue to evolve with new technologies and ideas, Aboel-Nil said.
"This keeps me up late and wakes me up early," he said. "I mean, really, it does because it's just so exciting."
