AI made practical: How you can make education fun with artificial intelligence

School can be fun. School can also be boring. And as it happens, school can be both! Whether you’re a parent or a teacher, finding a way to excite the children about the topic is the easiest way to get them to learn. So if you’re struggling with some boring topics, here are a few tips to use AI to your benefit.

We’ll be using Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. There are other options, but these are free and are very good. If you’re trying to do something a little bit more serious or in-depth, Perplexity.ai is also a good tool. It has a pro-mode with up to 5 free uses. Though, we feel this is better for research than it is for such tasks.

So how can AI really help with making learning fun?

1. Summarizing content
2. Visualizing content
3. Turning it into catchy tunes

Summarizing lots of content into smaller digestible chunks:

Large Language Models or LLMs as they are more colloquially known as, are very good at summarizing facts into easier to understand smaller bits. The best part about these AI models is that you can ask them to simplify the concepts to help your child understand it at their level. Whether it’s learning about Photosynthesis in plants or getting an introduction to Chemistry, these LLMs are very good at simplifying these concepts for kids. The AI is able to reduce or increase the complexity of a topic based on your prompt.

We recently taught our daughter about Photosynthesis and used Google’s Gemini to help simplify the concept.

Here’s a prompt that you can try (feel free to replace the keywords inside the brackets to fit your use case. Eg: 6th can be changed to any grade your kids are in. Biology can be changed to any subject you want and photosynthesis can be changed to any topic within that subject):

You are a {biology} teacher for {6th} graders. As an expert teacher who can make learning fun, please explain the concept of {Photosynthesis}.

Copy paste the prompt above👆

Response below: 👇

Imagine plants are like little chefs, but instead of a kitchen, they use the whole world to cook their food! Here’s how it works:

1. Sunshine Soup: The sun is like a giant stove, and plants use its light like sunshine soup. They have special green kitchens inside their leaves called chloroplasts (say “klor-o-plasts”). These chloroplasts have tiny chefs called chlorophyll (say “klor-o-fill”) that can trap the sunshine soup.
2. Watery Surprise: Plants also suck up water from the ground through their roots, like using a straw. This water is like the base for their yummy soup.
3. Air Nibbles: Tiny holes on the underside of leaves called stomata (say “sto-may-ta”) act like windows. Through these windows, plants take in air, which has invisible bits of carbon dioxide floating around. Think of carbon dioxide as tiny air nibbles for the soup.
4. Mixing it Up: Now comes the fun part! Inside the chloroplasts, the chlorophyll chefs use the sunshine soup’s energy to mix the water and carbon dioxide nibbles together. It’s like magic, but science!
5. Sugar Feast! After some mixing and bubbling, the chefs create a delicious kind of plant sugar called glucose (say “gloo-cohs”). This sugar is like the plant’s main course, giving them energy to grow tall and strong.
6. Sharing is Caring: Plants are nice chefs and share some of the oxygen they make while cooking (splitting the water) back into the air through the stomata windows. This oxygen is like the yummy dessert we breathe!

A picture is worth a thousand words: Visualizing the concepts

Explaining concepts isn’t just limited to text. The very same concepts can also be converted into visuals. We asked Gemini to go ahead and turn their explanation into a comic for the kids. In this case, we got panels – where we could regenerate the images to suit our preference. Then put the images into Canva and turned it into a comic panel. You don’t need Canva, but can make do with Powerpoint or Word as well.

Turning various topics into more easily memorable song lyrics

In case the topic is still boring you can turn these explanations into songs. Not every topic warrants a song, but this is a pretty good one to experiment with. We asked Gemini to turn its explanation into a song. After a few attempts, this is what we got:

(Verse 1) Plants are chefs, it’s true you see, Sunshine soup their recipe! Green leaves reachin’ for the sky, Catching sunlight, oh so high!

(Chorus) Photosynthesis, that’s the word, Making food the whole world heard! Water slurped from down below, Air nibbles join the yummy flow!

(Verse 2) Tiny chefs in kitchens green, Chloroplasts, a busy scene! Sunshine soup and water mix, Carbon dioxide, take a fix!

(Bridge) Stir and bubble, magic done, Sugary feast, the race is won! Plants grow strong and tall and bright, Filling up the world with light!

(Chorus) Photosynthesis, that’s the word, Making food the whole world heard! Water slurped from down below, Air nibbles join the yummy flow!

(Outro) Sharing breath, a gift so sweet, Plants and us, a teamwork treat! So next time you see a leaf so green, Remember sunshine soup, a tasty scene!

We’re quite happy with the result!

Actually adding music to these lyrics

Of course is a song without a tune really a song? You can now head over to Udio or Suno – who are really pushing the boundaries on AI in the world of music.

We used Udio for the song below, check it out:

The platform is built for beginners but let’s walk through the steps:

1. Step 1: Click in the search bar and type in the prompt. We went with Nursery rhymes and children’s music because we wanted to cue a cute kiddie vibe.
2. Step 2: Clicking on custom lyrics is very important or the platform will generate its own lyrics for you. Paste in the lyrics that we generated in Gemini.
3. Step 3: Just click on create. You’re done!

And immediately something as boring as Photosynthesis is now infinitely more interesting. We’ve seen success with this technique for children of all age groups. And the limit is only your imagination.

While this is a simple tutorial on how to make a topic fun and interesting for children, these AI tools can do a lot more. It’s all about getting comfortable with prompting. The more you use a tool, the easier it will become. With an explosion of text-to-video AI tools, you can also try making an explainer video and have one of your kids’ favourite characters voice out the explanations.

If you like this, do share it with other educators or parents.

See you in the next one!