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What’s the difference between a standard deviation and a variance?
If you don’t know, Babson College has the bot for you, and for the undergrads in Fundamentals of Business Analytics I.
“In some sense, the MathBot is just a supercharged collection of textbooks with a really fancy index,” Nathan Karst, a professor of applied mathematics, department chair, and campus facilitator of generative-AI pilots like MathBot, told IT Brew.
A class act. “Fundamentals” instructor Professor George Recck feels his class is the right fit for a tech tryout—a course that often references open-source material, but is “not quite x equals six,” he said. Probability and statistical models may provide undergrads with individual data points, but students have to interpret: “Does this number make sense?”
The computational model, built on Microsoft Azure and using GPT 4, pulls from around 10 open-source textbooks to answer questions like: “Define linear regression,” “What is a scatter plot,” and a follow-up like, “When would a scatter plot show a linear relationship?”
For the clueless who have no idea that a scatter plot is a graph representing the relationship between two sets of data—obviously—the MathBot provides concise answers, with citations to the referred-to textbook and links to the textbook page. The output provides potential assurance for the nervous newcomer on campus who may not want to attend office hours or ask a question in class, Recck said.
Testing, Testing. Babson CIO Patty Patria, about six months ago, she said, viewed generative AI as a potentially supportive technology for struggling students. Before deployment this fall, Babson IT team and Karst worked with their integration partner Terawe to ensure the tech gave passing answers—an ongoing challenge for a classroom tool.
“Is it going to be 100%? Probably not,” Patria said. “We’ll be happy if it’s at 90%, 95% and we’ll share that with our students. These things are not going to be 100%, especially a brand-new technology like AI.” Patria added that a Babson team will gather students’ post-semester opinions about the tool, its frequency of use, and its questions answered. (The MathBot is currently being used by two classes and about 70–80 students, according to Patria).
Schools like Harvard University, Washington University, the University of California, Irvine, and UC San Diego, are experimenting with ways to build their own chatbots to help students and teachers get their questions answered, often for outside-of-the-classroom support, like enrollment and IT.
“We don’t know if it's going to be an important tool. We think it could be,” Recck said, adding that MathBot should be one tool among many available learning options at the college, including the Math Resource Center, private tutoring, and group work—an especially important study skill for questions where the answer—x—isn’t a simple 6.
“Ask a question, get a response, and then critically examine whether that response is actually a true response. I think this is important, not just for this course, but just training students to use generative AI in general.” Karst said.