StepsAI in Mathematics Education

Dr Condon LAU [Staff Profile]

Associate Professor

Department of Physics

City University of Hong Kong

 

Enhancing Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Related Subjects with StepsAI

Teaching mathematics requires imparting basic concepts and providing students with questions and solutions to practise on. Similarly, students learn by understanding the concepts and practising extensively on questions. This approach of teaching and learning is common to quantitative subjects across the science, engineering, and business fields (e.g. physics, economics). The advance of generative AI chatbots, particularly in the past half year, has brought advantages and challenges to mathematics education. Leading chatbots, such as Gemini and ChatGPT, can solve many secondary school and university-level mathematics questions in less than a minute, while allowing easy-to-use input options and providing detailed solutions. For motivated mathematics students, chatbots are like a 24/7 tutor able to offer personalised questions and detailed solutions and explain mistakes. However, for less motivated students, chatbots are an advanced "calculator" for completing assignments with little thinking or learning. Professor Condon LAU and colleagues recently developed StepsAI technology to exploit the advantages of generative AI for mathematics education while addressing the challenges.

 

StepsAI takes a mathematics question as input and passes it to a chatbot for processing. Through an innovative prompting strategy, only the key steps of the solution, no detailed numbers or equations, are output to the user. The user, usually a student, is required to attempt each step by providing the numbers and equations as needed. At each step, StepsAI determines if the user's input is correct or incorrect and provides a detailed explanation. After eventually completing each step correctly, the student will have completed the question in a way that requires extensive thinking and learning. StepsAI leverages the advantages of generative AI by providing personalised questions and solutions and detailed assessments of user inputs. StepsAI is currently being used by weaker students in a mathematics remedial class, under the supervision of their teacher, to improve their abilities.

 

About the Featured Speaker

Professor Condon LAU is an Associate Professor of Physics at the City University of Hong Kong. He is also a co-founder of ITsci Comp Ltd, a local technology start-up supported by the university's HK Tech 300 programme and the Hong Kong government. Professor LAU received his undergraduate and postgraduate education at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. His expertise is in generative AI technology for education and healthcare.

 

GPTutor in Optometry Education

Dr Richard LUI [Staff Profile]

Senior Lecturer

Department of Computing

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

 

Dr Jessica NEUVILLE [Staff Profile]

Associate Professor of Practice

School of Optometry

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

 

Generative AI-Powered Virtual Patient Simulations for Optometry Students

GPTutor is a Generative AI (GenAI)-powered intelligent tutoring system developed at PolyU. It enables students to engage in self-directed learning by asking questions related to the course content provided by instructors. Both instructors and students can generate review questions and flashcards based on the instructor's materials to practice and enhance knowledge retention. Furthermore, the platform allows instructors to create realistic, simulation-based learning scenarios featuring AI avatars and text-to-speech capabilities. In this sharing session, we will introduce the platform's features and discuss how it creates virtual patient simulations for Optometry students.

 

About the Featured Speakers

Dr Richard LUI is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has extensive experience in adopting innovative pedagogies and developing educational platforms. Dr LUI has led multiple UGC-funded projects to create educational games, a cloud-based virtual laboratory and coding platform, and GenAI-powered learning systems.

 

Dr Jessica NEUVILLE is an Associate Professor of Practice at the School of Optometry, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a recipient of the Faculty Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching for her innovative teaching methods, including virtual simulations and the flipped classroom approach.