The AI Cheating Debate Was Never About the Kids | Maurice Dragon, CIO, Orange County Public Schools

I would love to know some examples.

So if I said, all right, math, give me an example of where maybe we've been focusing on the wrong things.

And like you said, we teach to the test.

Kids become test smart, not world smart or however you want to put it, but maybe contextually smart.

That's the problem.

I think the context and the comprehension can be missed sometimes.

Mm-hmm.

I'm going to give you a few subjects.

Math.

Where do you see us focusing maybe on the wrong thing where AI can really assist in education?

I think this goes back to one of the things that I think about technology allows us to do that I think in some ways we have lost as the world has become more complex.

And so what I mean is that When I think about technology, I think about scale, meaning that if you have numbers to add, there's a finite amount of numbers that a single person can put together.

When we were going to the moon, we had the ladies of NASA that were literally called computers, that they would do that math.

And then we now have spreadsheets and we have these other tools and resources.

But now that you're using those tools and resources, many folks, what they're using spreadsheets to do is they're using spreadsheets to handle a large data set, but they're handing a large data set that's specific to the company, that is specific to the organization, that's specific to whatever that they are

in.

What AI provides this ability to do now is... deal with a data set that is much broader, much more diverse, and where if you're talking about a where you're trying to deal with a problem of rainfall or you're trying to deal with a problem or in Florida hurricanes or anything else like that, there's a ton of data there that you can pull together that you can't just do on a spreadsheet like that's multiple spreadsheets that now you're dealing with data at a completely different scale.

And that's what I think about when I think about math and how AI impacts that field.

Number one, it gives us an ability to actually do math at a level that we can't do today, which is that it gives us the ability now to just pull in multiple data sets that... that at a scale that allows us to examine them.

And then when you have folks who are math experts, for them to apply that expertise in looking at that area.

The second thing I think about is the beauty of math, which is that it's not like there's a limit to the amount of math problems that exist.

But when you have to take time, and sometimes the time is in years that is measured to work on a math problem, you may have a limit to how many math problems people are willing to work on, right? And what AI provides is it provides more of a pathway now where you can go down roads that may not have, you know, you may not be sure if you can actually find the answer, but now you have a partner, right? as far as in the AI that can help you stretch a little bit further, maybe fail faster, but at least you've gone down a road and we are going down roads.

This is now AI and humans working together that, that we could not have before.

And then I think the other piece that this is a piece from something I was listening to with a mathematician, Terence Tao, I believe his name is where he was talking about how he uses AI.

And this is like a, you know, world famous mathematician.