The Power of AI in Teaching Mathematics

There have been a few posts on X from teachers (often those who also want mobile phones banned) bemoaning AI because their pupils were using it to do their homework. How might we respond to such a concern? So I asked ChatGPT what the solution might be and it came up with some ideas – which I have slightly adapted and pulled together in the document below.

First this is identifying a real problem, but often drawing the wrong conclusion from it. AI has exposed something that was already weak in a lot of homework design. If a pupil can complete the task by copying from an AI tool, then very often the task was mainly testing answer production, not understanding. That is not entirely the teacher’s fault – schools have relied on that model for years because it is quick to set, easy to mark, and familiar. But AI has made its weakness impossible to ignore.

There is actually a very interesting educational shift happening right now because of AI. This is forcing universities and schools to move from “solve this problem” homework to “analyse this solution” homework. It changes the intellectual skill being tested.

So, teachers are right to worry, but wrong to panic, and wrong if they think prohibition alone will rescue learning. The deeper challenge is to design educational tasks so that thinking still matters when answers are cheap. That, in truth, is now the central task for schools.

If a homework task is purely “solve these equations”, pupils can simply paste it into an AI tool. The trick is to design something that requires their own working, reasoning, and reflection, not just answers.

So, I asked ChatGPT “Can you write me a secondary school maths homework task on quadratic equations that pupils could not do by just asking AI.”

It came up with a set of tasks for that – which I have slightly adapted and reworded. I actually don’t think these are particularly paradigm-breaking because they are the sort of tasks many teachers have been doing for some time – we were doing similar things in the 1980s under the guise of “investigative teaching” for example.

However, this does suggest to me that part of the problem and panic over AI is down to it exposing a rather poorly designed curriculum and pedagogy which is not unfit for purpose as we move forward.

I hope this pdf might help…

The Power of AI in Teaching Mathematics