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Hunter Johnson for Educative

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at educative.io

Introducing AI-assisted feedback to supercharge your learning

This article was written by Educative's Co-founder and CEO, Fahim ul Haq.

I'm always looking for ways to improve the learning experience we provide to our users. That’s why today, I'm absolutely thrilled to share some groundbreaking news with you!

We've successfully integrated AI into the Educative platform to bring you more precise and relevant feedback that adapts to your progress. This means you'll be able to identify and fill knowledge gaps more efficiently by spending more time mastering concepts and less time on minor errors and edge cases.

As a developer, the key to success is mastering the fundamentals and staying up-to-date with the latest changes and advancements. However, learning new concepts can be time-consuming and frustrating when you're spending hours troubleshooting low-level issues involving specific details of code syntax or structure. While it's great to have a good grasp of those details, spending too much time on them can detract from the bigger picture and slow down the learning process.

That’s why we are introducing this brand-new feature to help make your learning experience as efficient and personalized as possible.

We're kicking off this AI-powered learning experience with our Grokking Coding Interview Patterns series of courses, but we're already working on incorporating more advanced AI features into our platform to provide you with even more individualized learning experiences.

Are you ready to supercharge your learning journey with AI? We most certainly are, so keep an eye out for the AI-Powered Beta badge! In the meantime, let's explore our latest AI-powered feature in beta, how it works, and why we're so excited about the potential for AI to revolutionize the EdTech industry.

How AI integration gives you a more personalized learning experience

Our top priority at Educative is to provide our learners with the best learning experience possible. The Grokking Coding Interview Patterns courses are designed to help learners practice implementing coding patterns and solve problems by writing code. This hands-on approach allows learners to build and refine their programming skills as they work through the courses.

To further enhance this learning experience, we've integrated an "Evaluate with AI" button into these popular courses as the first step in a long journey of planned AI-powered features. Now, you can evaluate and debug your code with the click of a button. This feature also provides feedback on test cases and can calculate the time and space complexity of different solutions.

AI

This can be incredibly helpful, especially for newer learners who may struggle to catch every possible error or edge case. Cognitive load theory suggests that learners have a limited amount of working memory, which can become overloaded if they are forced to process too much information at once. Working on edge cases, logic errors, minor syntax errors, and low-level implementation issues take up valuable space in working memory, adding unnecessary amounts of cognitive load.

With AI-driven feedback, learners can spend less time trying to identify obscure mistakes and more time coding.

How AI helps us learn more efficiently

Some errors are so subtle that even experienced developers have difficulty identifying them right away. This is especially true when working with complex algorithms and data structures, like in the Grokking Coding Interview Patterns courses.

So you can imagine how frustrating it can be for learners to spend hours bogged down by the intricacies of code. This is time that would have been better spent on understanding the fundamental concepts, problem-solving techniques, and coding patterns.

As an example, a common error in coding is forgetting to check for empty strings or null values. You could run test cases to determine which cases have failed and why, but extracting meaningful feedback from that alone can be difficult.

AI can get that feedback to you very quickly and precisely, showing you what your code is missing. This goes without saying, but the amount of time this saves when learning new programming concepts is invaluable.

"AI is fundamentally an applied technology that’s going to serve our society."
— Fei Fei Li, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

Li is right. Ultimately, AI is here to support, not replace, the human experience. I'm convinced that AI-assisted learning can be a powerful tool for connecting learners to the kind of personalized insight they need to quickly and confidently level up their coding skills.

Why we're excited to see how AI-assisted learning will shape the future of EdTech

"There's no longer a competitive advantage in knowing more than the person next to you, because that person will just Google it."
— Dr. Tony Wagner, Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute

AI-powered education is just the beginning of a new era of personalized learning. As AI continues to evolve and improve, we can expect an existing trend to become more and more apparent — that the ability to acquire and use knowledge will become exponentially more important than simply possessing knowledge.

As a whole, education will need to shift towards developing critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, as these are the skills that will provide the greatest competitive advantage in the coming years.

With AI-powered learning, we can unlock new possibilities for personalized, adaptive, and data-driven education that empowers learners to develop the critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity skills needed to thrive in the future.

Advantages of AI-powered learning:

  • Deepen critical thinking and problem-solving skills:
    AI can offer new perspectives and insights, helping learners to approach problems from different angles and develop a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts.

  • Address different learning preferences: Everyone learns differently, and AI can help to personalize the learning experience to suit each individual's learning style.

  • Promote a growth mindset: AI-assisted learning can help promote a growth mindset by offering learners opportunities for continuous improvement and growth. By providing personalized feedback and insights, learners can recognize their progress and accomplishments, which can further motivate them to continue learning and taking on new challenges.

  • Develop skills faster: Just as a GPS guides you through the most efficient route to your destination, AI can guide you through the most efficient learning path. It helps learners to identify their knowledge gaps and focus their efforts on areas that need improvement, ultimately making skill development more efficient.

Let’s embrace the future of learning together

I encourage you to check out one of our Grokking Coding Interview Patterns courses and experiment with the "Evaluate with AI" button for yourself.

At Educative, we're constantly striving to push the boundaries of what's possible in online learning. We strongly believe that education should be accessible to all, and that technology can play a transformative role in making that a reality. This is just the beginning, and I'm very excited to see what the future holds for AI and education.

As always, we appreciate your support and feedback, so let me know what you think about this new feature.

As alwyas, happy learning!

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