A dozen students huddled at communal classroom tables one morning this spring, their gazes fixed on math lessons on their laptops.The sixth graders at Khan Lab School, an independent school with an elementary campus in Palo Alto, Calif., were working on quadratic equations, graphing functions, Venn diagrams. But when they ran into questions, many did not immediately summon their teacher for help.They used a text box alongside their lessons to request help from Khanmigo, an experimental chatbot tutor for schools that uses artificial intelligence.The tutoring bot quickly responded to one student, Zaya, by asking her to identify specific data points in a chart. Then Khanmigo coaxed her to use the data points to solve her math question.“It’s very good at walking you through the problem step by step,” Zaya said. “Then it congrat …
