Today, when you talk about students and generative artificial intelligence, you are probably catching a glimpse of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they helpful?ai-for-education/”>HurrahGreat for research! Quick!) Or are they harmful? (ai-is-coming-to-schools-and-if-were-not-careful-so-will-its-biases/”>Boo! Wrong information! Unfaithful!). But some startups are taking the arrival of generative ai to the school environment as a positive and foregone conclusion. And they're creating products to meet what they think will be a certain market opportunity.
Now, one of them has raised some money to fulfil that ambition.
ai/”>Magic School ai, which is creating generative ai tools for educational environments, has closed a $15 million Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Denver-based MagicSchool started with tools for educators, and its founder and CEO, Adeel Khan, said in an interview that it now has about 4,000 teachers and schools using its products to plan lessons, write tests and produce other materials. Learning.
More recently, it has also begun developing tools for students, provided by their schools. MagicSchool will use the funds to continue developing more in both directions, as well as work on onboarding more clients, hiring talent, and more.
This latest round also includes backing from some very prominent investors. They include Adobe Ventures (whose parent company, Adobe, has been investing heavily in ai on its platform) and Common Sense Media (the age-based technology reviews specialist that has been dabbling in generative ai with a partnership of guidelines from ai with OpenAI and chatbot ratings. People in the round include Replit founder Amjad Masad, Clever co-founders Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia, and OutSchool co-founder Amir Nathoo. (Some of them were also early investors in the company: it had previously raised about $2.4 million.)
Khan did not disclose MagicSchool’s valuation in this round, but investors believe backing app bets like this is a natural next step for ai startups after the hundreds of millions that have been invested in infrastructure companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral.
“We’re in an ai moment for education, a huge opportunity to create an assistant for both teachers and students,” said Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in an interview. “They have the opportunity to help teachers with lesson planning and other tasks that take time away from their students.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-from-teacher-to-ai-preacher”>From Professor to ai Preacher
MagicSchool, despite its name, did not come out of nowhere.
Khan started out as an educator, initially working for Teach for America when he left college. (And his interest in public service and the role education plays may have begun even before that: At Virginia tech, he was student body president at the time of the Virginia tech shooting (I unfortunately had a front row seat to the ravages of gun violence.)
As a teacher, he showed early signs of tapping into his business and leadership interests when he moved to Denver with the idea of starting his own school.
He first worked in various administrative roles at local schools, and eventually founded his own, a charter high school called DSST: Conservatory Green High School, which saw its first cohort of graduates achieve 100% acceptance into four-year universities.
While taking a break from that frenzy of activity, Khan came up with the idea for MagicSchool.
“It was around November 2022 when ChatGPT was dominating the headlines and generative ai became popular in most parts of the country,” he recalled. “As I was thinking about what I would do next, I started experimenting with it and immediately came to mind how much use this new technology could have for educators.”
He held workshops on early versions of using generative ai to create tools for teachers, visited the schools where he had taught himself, and explained the possibilities to his former colleagues. But he didn't click.
“They found the interface complicated and it just wasn't sticky,” he said. Khan's demonstrations inspired the desired “wow,” but left to their own devices, the teachers would use it once and never again.
“They would say, 'I spent so much time trying to push it and get it to do what I wanted it to do, which didn't save me time, it cost me time.'”
Their solution was to come up with more specific customizations.
“Behind the scenes, we were just giving really sophisticated guidance and also making sure that the outcomes were what an educator would expect,” she said.
Some examples of what teachers are creating with MagicSchool include lesson plans, tests and quizzes, course materials, and modified versions of materials prepared for more or less challenging learning levels. MagicSchool continues to experiment with all of this. Khan said he works a lot with OpenAI APIs, but also with Anthropic and others. Behind the scenes, he said, the company does A-B testing to determine what works best in each scenario.
Still, convincing teachers (who weren't paying to use the product) and then schools (who were paying) to sign up for MagicSchool wasn't exactly easy.
“I couldn’t get a meeting with any school or district when we first started with the product, including the one I worked at, there was so much fear about it,” she said. All it took was “one negative headline about ai being used in schools … about how ai is going to take over the world and robots” to shut down any conversation.
That gradually began to change as society and industry adopted ai more widely and more advanced models were implemented. Saving time was the most obvious reason for using it, he said, but they also found it was good for generating ideas and even offering a supplement to what they could learn on their own.
“I think educators didn't know or expect what ai could do for them and the audience,” he said.
On top of that, he has a second argument for why it makes sense to incorporate more ai into the classroom: It will be part of how everything is done, so it's a school's job to make sure its students are ready for that.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-ai-is-smart-but-it-s-not-human-smart”>ai is smart, but it is not “human-like”
That said, there are limitations to how ai can be used in any scenario, including the classroom.
“ai has a very different type of intelligence than human intelligence. Humans have developed an emergent intelligence that is, in some ways, the product of millions of years of pruning through natural selection. It's very holistic. It's very flexible, cognitively,” said Mutlu Cukurova, a professor of education and ai at University College London, where there is a years-long research lab looking at different permutations of ai and learning. (A very realistic conclusion of a recent article:A hybrid approach encompassing both ai and humans is needed.
“ai has engineered intelligence, not emergent intelligence. That means it is designed for a very specific goal or set of goals. “AIs are brilliant at this particular goal and indicate significant signs of intelligence, but it is a different type of intelligence.”
This could be particularly relevant for students and how they will learn in an ai world, or for teachers who may not have enough experience to know when the ai version of a learning material like a quiz is not good enough.
While Cukurova said automating certain tasks can be a valuable use case, “where it becomes problematic is when teachers…don't have enough experience before learning to do these kinds of things themselves.”
Khan said MagicSchool aims to take this into account, particularly when it comes to students. He said schools control what services they offer students on the platform and that it is clear when they have used MagicSchool for an assignment.
This all sounds great in theory, but ultimately the cracks may only reveal themselves in stress tests.
For example, will a cash-strapped school district look to rely more on input from ai systems during class time with teachers? Or how will schools be able to identify when students are using ai tools outside of the classroom in ways that have not been approved by their teachers?
This will require a different type of ai education, says Cukurova. “This is an important piece of the puzzle: how do we educate and train to use ai effectively and ethically?”
