COLUMBUS, Ohio — While Apple updates are known for apps and fun emojis, the iOS 18 update has a new feature that could impact how teachers and students learn in the classroom.
Math Notes is one of the many new features that will be a part of the iOS 18 update. The goal of the app is to be able to put any math problem in the app, and with the use of artificial intelligence, it can finish and find the answer while matching the author’s handwriting using the Apple pencil.
There's been questions about how this could impact students in the class. According to the EdWeek Research Center, teachers across the U.S. say that about 40% of their students perform below grade level in math.
When speaking with professors who specialize in teaching the math teachers of tomorrow, they said that teachers should embrace the use of AI and use it as a tool to explain how the computer solved the problem after finding several issues with the math problem Apple used in the promotion video.
“They made mistakes, major mistakes on three of the problems, three that I found so far,” said Joanne Caniglia, who serves as an education professor at Kent State University. “What we really want students to know about any kind of technology is the limitations and that they always have to know, have to understand the mathematics themselves.”
They encourage it as a way teachers can engage students while also increasing comprehension.
“We've done this on occasion with our future teachers as well, either with planning out a task that they could give their students or or actually evaluating how to solve the task,” said Karl Kosko, who serves as an education professor at Kent State University. “They'll be able to point out some of the specific things that are happening there oftentimes in ways that they might not have done if we were even to give them examples of students work, because all of a sudden it's a lot it's a lot easier to criticize a computer than as a human.”
Both professors from Kent State agreed that these AI functions in the future could also be helpful for things like grading and surveying common mistakes made by their students. The Apple iOS 18 update is set to launch sometime this fall.