Learn more about how Kira's AI tutor can help keep your students engaged.
What is the AI Tutor?
Kira’s AI Tutor is an AI tool that provides students with supportive hints when completing coding problems—it never gives away the answer. The AI tutor will give students guidance so that if they are struggling with a coding problem, then they can continue to make progress, instead of remaining indefinitely stuck. Students will be able to have 10 interactions with the AI tutor per problem by default but this can be changed by the teacher or turned on/off by the teacher as desired.
It is important to note that this tool is in Beta mode, like all the modern AI tools, which means it may make mistakes occasionally with its advice. Encourage students to check with you if they are confused by the guidance it has given them, or if they think a piece of advice is wrong. You can report any of these incidents to support@kira-learning.com, and we will use your input to continue improving our AI Tutor.
Facilitating Student Usage of the Kira AI Tutor
Choosing Whether to Enable the Kira AI Tutor
- First, decide whether you want to enable or disable students’ access to the Kira AI Tutor for coding activities that don’t involve Platypus. Student access to the AI Tutor is enabled by default.
- Navigate to the section settings to alter the AI tutor settings.
- Here you may select the number of prompts per question or turn the tutor off (and back on again!) as needed:
- We hope you will keep the AI Tutor enabled! Students do not have open-ended access to this tool like they do with a chatbot, where they can submit prompts that they create. They are constrained to interacting with the AI Tutor only in coding activities, and they use only four given buttons to interact with the AI Tutor:
- “Yes, that would be helpful!” (to get help from the AI Tutor)
- “Yes, that was helpful!” (after they’ve gotten help from the AI Tutor)
- “That was helpful, but I am still stuck.” (asking for more help)
- “No, that wasn’t very helpful to me.” (asking for more help)
- The Kira AI Tutor can be very helpful when students are stuck, giving them personalized feedback on their coding challenges.
If you do decide to enable the Kira AI Tutor, you can also limit how many maximum requests for help a student may make for any given coding activity. You can set the limit anywhere from 1 to 10. The default is set at 10. The count resets with each new coding activity the student is on.
Monitoring Student Usage
- Some students may get into a habit of repeatedly asking Kira AI for help without trying much on their own. Point out to them that this habit will reduce the learning they should be getting on each coding exercise, and make the later assignments and projects more difficult for them.
- If many students continue with this pattern, you can consider telling them that you may need to disable the Kira AI Tutor for the class so they begin trying to think for themselves again.