An EdTech Journey with Piumal

ScienceDojo did not begin with a website, a business plan or a piece of software. It began with students saying something I had heard far too many times: “I’m just not good at science.” Over more than a decade of teaching and tutoring Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science, I met many capable students who had started to believe this about themselves. They were not unintelligent. They were not lazy. In many cases, they were genuinely curious and wanted to learn. But somewhere along the way, they had encountered an explanation that did not make sense to them. The class moved forward, the confusion remained, and eventually that confusion became part of how they saw themselves. “I don’t understand this” slowly became “I am not good at this.” That difference matters. Students do not all understand in the same way Some students understand a concept when they see a diagram. Others need a real-world example. Some need to talk through the idea, while others need to attempt several...

       This is the first in a series about my master's research on AI question generation for scientific reading comprehension. Before I get into what I built or what I found, I want to tell you why. And the reasons go back a lot further than the thesis itself. It started with a teacher, not a technology I still remember a science teacher I had as a child who always started class by asking us about the last lesson. Not a test. Not a quiz for marks. Just questions. "What did we say happens when…?" He would throw them out casually, almost like he was thinking aloud, and then wait for us to dig the answer back out of our own heads. And somehow, because he made us retrieve it rather than just re-read it, that knowledge stuck. Years later, decades later, I still have it. I didn't have a word for what he was doing back then. Now I do. It's called active recall. And in a quiet way, that classroom is where this whole research journey begins. The dream is older than the AI...