There's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0]

Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.

The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo

[1] http://www.instituteofplay.org

> Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft

I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents, ... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building anything.

It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour-of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).

I don't mean to say that every child shows a natural interest in programming. But I didn't have access to YouTube 30 years ago when I was first learning to program. And even with the resources available, we were the privileged few who were able to pursue our curiosity.

Teenagers congregated in the same place, away from their parents? That's the age when humans tend to get much more curious about other humans. You could have them code on paper, and reason with each other while looking at each other.

Yes, it's happening, but inexpensive tools aren't widely available or integrated into a lot of content, and content isn't yet being widely developed with dynamic content in mind. There needs to be work in how 'teachers customize instruction' that challenge widely used instructional design models.

There's a lot of work being done in places were the pockets are deeper (military, simulations, medicine). Recently, standards (xAPI, Caliper) have started to emerge to enable the decoupling of content, content delivery, and interaction (think MVC pattern) and to enable pervasive, multi-modal learning activity tracking.

With Khan Academy I recall they tried exposing some measure of competencies on different aspects of a subject based on their testing, so as the interactive human / 'teacher' you could help the student more specifically and not waste time drilling on what they know, and especially not waste time on canned lectures done better elsewhere which everyone can watch as homework.

A fun if unrealistic alternative, have the professor move fast enough to give the illusion of individual clones for each student: https://youtu.be/ZJy8qH8Fw5s

Siyavula [0] is making big advances in this area for maths and science high school education in South Africa. Their intelligent practice platform uses machine learning to pick the 'best' exercise for individuals when they practice to ensure that everyone gets the optimal difficulty practice question.

[0] http://www.siyavula.com/