There's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0]
Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.
The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.
> Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft
I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents, ... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building anything.
It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour-of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).
I don't mean to say that every child shows a natural interest in programming. But I didn't have access to YouTube 30 years ago when I was first learning to program. And even with the resources available, we were the privileged few who were able to pursue our curiosity.
Teenagers congregated in the same place, away from their parents? That's the age when humans tend to get much more curious about other humans. You could have them code on paper, and reason with each other while looking at each other.
Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.
The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo
[1] http://www.instituteofplay.org