Developing my own chatbot assistant has changed the way I teach

By Laura Wheeler, Meadowbank School

From 2020-2022, I completed a Master of Contemporary Education with The Mind Lab. During this time, I created a change project to personalise my students’ learning to increase their agency. As I taught them during lockdowns, I noticed that they were keen on receiving instant responses to questions about their learning, which I was not always able to provide. In class, I found that a lot of learning time was wasted when children had to search for resources to help them achieve their goals. That’s when I decided to research what could solve these problems, but I was unable to find exactly what I was looking for.

During my research, I found examples of universities using chatbots to give quick responses to frequently asked questions. AI was described as an emerging and disruptive technology that could free up teacher time to focus on supporting individual learners. Although I didn’t find any chatbots that were made for younger children, I thought this was precisely what I needed, so I decided to create my own using Dialogflow.

My Agency Bot System

It took about six months to learn how to code it, decide on the flow of the conversation and input the data. I wanted to provide my students with choice about how they wanted to learn, so I made question cards, videos, and found online games to match all of the learning goals at my year level in the Number strand of Mathematics.

To make the chatbot more ‘kid-friendly,’ I gave it a name: My Agency Bot System or MABS for short. Due to their age, I needed to carefully code my chatbot to ensure that differences in literacy ability did not hinder their experience. Students used MABS independently to find the best learning activity to achieve their goals.

I utilised the AI capabilities to train the chatbot to understand the intention of requests from children. It could interpret spelling mistakes or autocorrect them. I also added textbased responses and buttons for them to click to make more complex requests faster.

Tailor content

Having my students provide feedback and influence the design of MABS helped make it an integral aspect of our classroom learning. They helped add content based on their interests or next steps, and designed the favicon for my website. By creating MABS myself, I was able to tailor the content to meet the interests of my students. It quickly became a highlight of my classroom, and after a few tweaks, I shared it with the other Year 4 classes at my school. MABS was also a useful tool when their child’s learning needs. It allowed them to access resources they could use

Even Commented Used To Struggle To Get Their Child

Maths homework, but their child loves MABS, and they struggle to get

The learning outcomes of using MABS were

MABS: STUDENT USING THE CHATBOT

huge. As part of my Master’s, I had to track their achievement and analyse their progress. The cohort that used MABS made, on average, double the progress of the cohort the previous year. Their understanding of what they needed to do to achieve their goals developed. All were excited to complete their Maths tasks as they got to choose how they accessed the information. Plus, MABS had lots of little features that made it fun to use. Using one of the pre-built agents called ‘Small Talk’ helped to humanise MABS and meant children had more realistic conversations with it.

Significant coding

Creating MABS required me to have a logical and systematic approach to coding. Drawing on my knowledge of block coding, I had a basic understanding of how to create my own code. Although there was plenty of content online for support, some of it was too complex for me to understand or irrelevant, so I enlisted the help of my husband, who is a more competent coder. Once I had the structure of the code for each intent and event, I could use it for other requests.

The biggest challenge I faced was the sheer scale of coding required to cover all the learning goals in multiple ways. I had to spend a significant amount of time researching and planning the flow of the conversation, and then inputting the data. As the chatbot was designed for younger children, I had to ensure that differences in literacy ability did not hinder their experience with it, which required additional effort to design the chatbot to be accessible to all learners.

The process of developing MABS changed my teaching practice substantially, and I had to be adaptable and flexible to incorporate new teaching strategies and practices. However, the positive outcomes, such as the significant progress made by students and their increased understanding of their learning needs, made it all worth it in the end.

Quickly grasped

I’m proud of the love and effort I put into developing MABS, and the positive effect it had on my students’ interest toward Mathematics. I was thrilled how quickly they grasped MABS’s functionality.

I now use MABS all the time in my classroom. It serves as an independent activity for students to work on and make progress toward achieving their goals. This year I’m adding more content to MABS, as well as working with a new team of teachers who aren’t yet familiar with it, so their students can benefit from this tool.

Sharing MABS with others is a great way to give back to the teaching community and to continue exploring the potential of AI in education.

Embracing innovation in my teaching practice proved to be a game-changer, yielding substantial positive outcomes. I encourage other educators to explore new technologies, seek feedback from learners to enhance the learning experience, and be open to change and disruption as they navigate the learning process.

Laura Wheeler is a Year 4 Teacher at Meadowbank School in Auckland.

About Dialogflow

This is a Google service which operates on a Google Cloud Platform. It’s an NLP (Natural Language Processing) platform that can be used to design and integrate a conversational user interface into apps and websites. dialogflow.cloud.google.com