Math students can soon call upon an avatar of their classroom teacher — a round-faced cartoon created by artificial intelligence to capture their likeness, voice, vocabulary and cadence — to respond directly to their questions in real time.
A new application designed to scale up extra help, Goblins was launched in the winter of 2024. Since then, a disembodied voice has been assessing students’ work in fifth- through 12th-grade math and responding as they write out equations, speak or type their questions.
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But come early October, the company says, that same gentle drilling will be delivered by the teachers they know best — but only if these often tech-wary educators allow the avatar feature.
Sawyer Altman, Goblins CEO (Sawyer Altman)
Sawyer Altman, who co-created the app and gave it a quirky name to stand out in a crowded field, bets they will: Goblins embraces — rather than replaces — their role, he said.
“We believe the connection a teacher has with their students is very special and it’s an essential part of that social motivation, the idea that this person sees me, cares about me, is willing to invest in me,” Altman said. “We want to make it possible for teachers to step into this new era of education, which is AI enhanced, on their own terms, where they are still the center of teaching.”
More than a quarter of Goblins’ 16,000 student users — whom Altman said he landed by cold calling their school districts — are located in New York City.
But his technology can be found in 24 states spanning urban and rural communities, from Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona to Putnam County School District in Florida and a string of Pennsylvania private schools, he said. Students use Goblins for help with Algebra 1 more than any other course.
Michael Molchan, high school math and science teacher (Michael Molchan)
Michael Molchan, who teaches high school-level math and science to some 40 students at a regional, four-county education center in Pennsylvania, said he’s had good luck with Goblins so far and is open to being “cloned.”
“If a little avatar of Mr. Molchan opens up and sounds like me, that could be another way of connecting with students and I would certainly be all for that,” he said, adding AI is evolving quickly and that teachers should accept rather than fear it. “If we embrace it and encourage it, but also help the students understand how to use it, they will be better for it.”
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Altman, 30 and a 2017 Stanford University graduate who majored in science, technology and society, served briefly as a precalculus teacher at a New York City high school.
He loved working one-on-one with students to identify gaps in their knowledge — and the relief that came with addressing a problem that could harm their grades and self-confidence, he said.
With up to 30 kids in a class though, there wasn’t enough of him to go around, he said. That frustration is what prompted him to create the app, which he markets as a math teacher cloning device.
Altman knows of education technology’s shortcomings in the classroom and hopes his company can overcome the challenges others could not.
“For so long, ed tech has been hampered by the fact that the tools they created are just not that engaging,” Altman said. “There has been this dream of personalization for at least a decade.”
And now, he said, it’s here. Altman’s AI-powered learning competitors in the math space include the better-known IXL, IReady and the household name that is Duolingo.
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But, he argues, his company’s product, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, is more varied in its communication, conversing with students using speech, handwriting and text. The accompanying avatar will be a step beyond that.
The cartoonish icons are surprisingly easy to make: Teachers upload a single selfie and then speak into their phone or computer’s microphone for just 30 seconds to create an image in their likeness, he said.
Goblins works on multiple devices, including touch screen and non-touch screen Chromebooks, iPads and smartphones. Its verbal feedback is accompanied by a written transcript and guides students using Socratic or open-ended questioning, Altman said.
Jenn Tifft is a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Rutland Town School in Vermont and has been using Goblins for about a year. She said her students enjoyed learning to craft their interaction with the app to get the type of support they need.
“They get to learn how to use AI as a tool to help guide them, as opposed to doing their work for them,” she said. “They liked having it as an option in the classroom.”
But at least one critic disagrees with Altman’s approach. Benjamin Riley is founder of Cognitive Resonance, a consulting company which seeks to help people understand cognitive science and generative AI. He’s long been skeptical about AI’s role in education — and even more so about this endeavor.
“Whether the avatar looks and sounds like the actual teacher is irrelevant,” he said. “It is not sentient, and therefore has no capacity to imagine what is happening in the minds of students. This is true of all AI ‘tutoring’ systems. And having it look and sound like the actual human teacher strikes me as a particularly bad idea. What will happen to classroom norms when kids discover they can be rude to the avatar in ways they would never dare with an actual human?”
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Altman understands Riley’s concerns, admitting his is a novel technology that “has the potential to rewrite classroom norms.” But he said, too, the context of the classroom keeps kids accountable for their behavior.
Goblins, a private company of just six employees, offers its services in more than 30 languages. And the type of information it generates helps more than the students themselves, Altman said: Classroom teachers have access to a truncated transcript of their students’ interaction with the app and analytics, helping them zero in on any weak points.
This, Altman said, better informs their interaction with individual students, or, if several children are ensnared in a mathematical quagmire, rearrange the focus of their lessons.
Meghan St. Cyr, achievement director for middle school math at KIPP NJ, piloted Goblins last school year before expanding its use to some 550 sixth graders in Newark.
She said the technology helps them with geometry, ratios, fractions and rational numbers, among other topics — and agrees with Altman on the time-saving element.
“Teachers’ response has been fairly positive overall,” she said, adding that it helps children understand more than whether they answered a question correctly. “It identifies where they might have made a mistake and whether they are far away from the right answer — or close to it.”
The Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.