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How to use math or science tutoring on Khanmigo
Sal Khan shows us some effective ways to work with Khanmigo in Math and Science—you can talk to Khanmigo in exercises, videos, and articles in the main library, or in activities like "Tutor me: Math and Science" in the activities section. Created by Sal Khan.
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Video transcript
- [Sal] If you're looking
for help with math or science on Khan Academy, especially if you have access to Khanmigo, there's two ways of doing it. One is, it could be while
you are doing that exercise or watching a video or reading
an article on Khan Academy. And so for example, this right over here is
a percent word problem. If you're having difficulty with it, you can open up Khanmigo and you can start asking
Khanmigo questions about this. Now, you have to be a
little bit thoughtful about how you might ask those questions. We, these little bubbles
here give you some things that you could write, but
you could write anything. Now, I'll first give you
an example of something that is not so useful to write, that we have seen students do. Sometimes they just write, I don't know. And the problem with
that is, think about it. It's hard for even a teacher or a friend that if you were
to just keep telling them question mark or I don't know, or, huh, you're not giving them a lot of information
about why you're confused. So if I wrote, huh, that's not
going to be so useful again. Khanmigo is gonna say, well,
I don't know what exactly to make of this, huh. Okay, let's think. So it's trying to just keep, keep writing or saying things in ways
that might be helpful for us. So now let's actually
engage with the problem and think about what could we write that'll actually be useful. Okay, let's think. If 27 cars are 60% of the total, how can we find 100 cars? What can we do with the
numbers that we have? Now, it's completely okay
if you're still confused, but it's better to ask
where your confusion is. So for example, maybe I think, so, should I take 60% of 27? So even though I know that
this is not the correct way to do it, this is much more information to the artificially
intelligent tutor to Khanmigo about what you might be
thinking about doing. So this is a more useful thing to say. Once again, it does
not have to be correct. No, we need to find out what 100% is. If 60% is 27 cars, what
can we do to find out what a hundred percent is? So, I'm tempted to solve
this problem with you, but I'm just reminding
you try to tell Khanmigo exactly where you are and
exactly what your question is. Giving as many details as possible. The same way that you
would do it for a teacher. And it's not just in math,
it could be in science. This right over here is
our middle school science. Once again, if you just write, huh, it's not going to know
where your confusion is, but it does ask questions. Do you know what food does for us? If you said it does something,
not going to be so useful, but you said, food is where
we get our energy from. So try to answer the question. The more that you do that, the better an answer you are going to get. Now, what I've just showed was Khanmigo operating on the side while
you're doing an exercise of video or an article. The second way that you use Khanmigo is you can just go to the activities page and you could say, "Tutor
me in math and science." And here the same principles apply. Try to ask real questions. You can't just say, I am confused. It won't know what you're confused about. If you just walked up to me on the street and said, Sal, I'm confused. Well, I'd say, well, what
are you confused about? And that's what Khanmigo is doing. Oh, I see. Let's untangle
this confusion together. Can you tell me what
you're confused about? Is it a math problem, a science
concept, or something else? So try to give as much
information as possible. Now, the last thing I will say is Khanmigo can make mistakes sometimes, and we write that right over there. It's much less likely to make mistakes if you're doing the tutoring
with Khan Academy content. Really, those first two
examples that I showed you. Right over here in Tutor
Me in math and science, this is a much better place if you are just looking
for some broad concept. You wanna know how the world works, but you're not as much trying
to solve a particular problem. It will usually give you
the correct tutoring for it, but it's better to do
it when you're doing it with existing Khan Academy
videos, exercises, or articles.