Robotics, AI, and School Choice

Brian Ledtke: Hello and welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats.

I’m Brian Ledtke and I’m on the communications team at EdChoice and we’re in Rome actually today at the International School Choice and Reform Conference and I am joined today by Jennifer Clare Wolverton, founder and CEO of Microcollective for AI, Robotics and the Sciences. And before we jump into talking about AI and Sciences and Robotics, how about you just introduce yourself and talk about how you got to where you are today.

Jennifer Wolverton: All right, well thank you so much for having me here. I’m so excited to talk to EdChoice today. I love all the work that you guys are doing.

My name is Jennifer Wolverton and I had a long journey before starting MARS. MARS was really an output of all the steps that I took before. I never planned to start MARS.

I was an engineer and then a homeschool mom and then because I was an engineer and I love math, I ended up teaching a lot of math over the years, writing math curriculum because I didn’t love the stuff that was out there after I learned about classical education. So as my kids grew up, I had two graduates already from homeschool and I had my youngest at home and we moved to a place called Rocket City. Huntsville, Alabama is called Rocket City and I was so excited to move there.

There was going to be people who would be making all these STEM classes that I had always been making for the homeschool community around me. And when I got there, I found out there actually wasn’t for the homeschool community. There were some things in the community that private school kids would attend after 3 p.m., but homeschoolers really want their stuff during the school day too. And so I ended up making MARS for my youngest son, which is what a lot of homeschool moms do, right? And so that’s really how MARS came about. And now we’re just going heavy into all the things.

So drones, quadrupeds. I’d really love to get a humanoid in the next couple of years on campus. Yeah.

So yeah, that’s MARS.

Brian Ledtke: Yeah. Talk a little bit more about what you do with MARS and the students. What do they get to work on and experience and all that?

Jennifer Wolverton: Yeah. So we have some of our own courses and then we have what I call endorsed curriculum. So in-house, we have AI Writers Guild, which is where we write novels with the assistant of AI.

And we have Grammar Foundry that we’ve developed in-house. And just over Thanksgiving, we’re still developing it all because, you know, AI has only been here really the way it is with generative AI since 2022. So the AI editing lab we just created over Thanksgiving and we’re already implementing it in the classroom so that there’s an A week and a B week.

And then A week is totally human week and you must only write with your human self. And then the B week is when you take your human writing and you run it through an AI, get your own grade on it so the kids can now grade themselves. And we have these really extensive rubrics.

So when they can understand part A of the rubric and they know every line of it very, very well, they move on to the B part all the way through D. And so if there are, say, 20 lines in this rubric, they’re going to be really detailed in how they’re writing if they can master our AI editing lab. And so really excited to start experimenting with that.

That’s brand new. And then we wanted to do drones this year after doing quadrupeds last year. And I’m really trying to drive the kids into robotics because robots are coming and I want them to come from America.

Our kids need to be able to build the robots, the humanoids and the quadrupeds. And drones are going to be really important to our safety as countries in the future. And we just need so many more people to be doing things with drones.

So we brought drones in, but we wanted to combine it with one of our subjects. So I combined it with physics and we write our own curriculum that’s just now drone physics. And then we have our own algebra curriculum and podcasting through history is one of my kids’ favorites.

Brian Ledtke: That’s amazing. I wish that would have been around when I was in school, doing something that would have been so fun. So with AI in schools, why do you think it’s so important to integrate AI and teach AI and work alongside AI, like you said, with the writing, the novels and teach that in school?

Because a lot of people and a lot of parents are like, AI, bad, don’t use it. Don’t use chat GPT, don’t use any of that. So why do you think that’s important to integrate?

Jennifer Wolverton: Yeah. So that’s a really good question because our kids are going to be having it in their lives from now on. It’s not actually going to go anywhere.

We kind of all understand that. And what is that really going to look like for them? It’s hard to even envision.

But one of the things I encourage people to do in the classroom is civics. We should be doing civics every single year from now on, because we’ve got to start to have real conversations and experiments with bills and laws of how we’re going to interact with robots. How are we going to interact with AI ethics, AI literacy?

How are we going to be allowing the companies like OpenAI, ChatGPT to put their products out into the world? Should we be limiting and regulating them? We don’t really know yet.

And so we need our kids to understand the bill writing policies and how do you get a bill through your statehouse. And so if you have a program where you have civics happening every single year on campus, you’ll do it different with a third grader, you’ll do it different with a sixth grader, you’ll do it different with an eighth grader, and you’ll probably take them to your statehouse and they’ll get to know people, they’ll be more civically interactive in their entire lifetime if they do this every single year.

And I just really think that our kids who are digital natives, I am not actually. I am 40-ish and I didn’t get a computer until, I didn’t have my own computer until I went to college. I didn’t have my own mobile phone until college.

I think I took typing and not keyboarding. And I don’t really, I don’t actually think I’m that old. So like the people around me that I interact with all the time, like all of us kind of are that way.

But our kids are not, like they were born with mobile phones in their back pockets. And so it’s funny when you ask these kids, what would you write your bill on? I was pretty surprised at some of the bills the kids wrote in our first year last year.

So I’m looking forward to doing it again this year and seeing what the kids write. My favorite bill, I’ll just tell you, was making sure that this child wanted to legislate that robots would never have supremacy over humans. Like a robot could never write a bill.

And so like we were literally using AI to legislate AI. It was so fun. Yeah.

Brian Ledtke: So is there any concern that spending so much time with AI that it’s just going to be screen time, screen time, screen time? What are your thoughts on that?

Jennifer Wolverton: Yeah. So I get this question all the time in conferences when I’m speaking, because it is a huge concern. But what people don’t know is that robots really are coming.

The humanoids are being built. We don’t have a lot of robot companies building humanoids in the states, but we do have a couple. And as we get to the point where there are more robots, the kids are going to be able to have things like a pet dog robot tutor, and they could all have their own.

I’ve got a student in my classroom right now actually designing one. So we bought a product called Petoi, P-E-T-O-I, because there aren’t really any quadrupeds that you can buy for education yet that are in the states. So this is a Chinese company.

We’re trying to use this as a way to design a chatbot that could be alongside a student so that you’re studying something like physics, and you have a question about the forces of physics and the forces of flight. And you have this ability to ask any question at any time and get an answer. And yeah, sometimes they’re going to be wrong answers, and they’re going to have to work their way through things and continue iterating and conversating.

But that really is going to be the future where hardware is going to change. And so screen time is an issue today, but I don’t believe that it’s going to be in about five or 10 years when we have hardware in the classroom that looks different than a laptop.

Brian Ledtke: Is there anything you’re worried about with the, and we don’t obviously know what the future is bringing because everything’s changing so much, but is there anything when you’re thinking about that you’re worried about having AI in the schools or AI in the home? Is there anything you’re worried about?

Jennifer Wolverton: Yeah, so actually the one thing I’m most worried about is the fact that the public school system holds the most children. And so you have 80 percent of the children in the public school system, and they move very slowly. So with the program that I wrote called AI Writers Guild, I wrote it about two years ago, and then I wrote it that second semester.

So it was like six months, and I ran it. And then by the next fall when I ran it again, I had to rewrite quite a bit of it because the AI had already changed so much drastically within six months. And so my big fear is for the big sprawling systems like the public school system, and they’re going to be unable to adapt and flex fast enough as the systems change.

And you buy products that are worth millions of dollars for all these kids. You’re not just going to buy a new one the next year. And so my biggest concern is that that’s 80 percent of the kids.

And so I’m really hoping that as time goes on, we’re going to see that micro-schooling in particular, but homeschooling as well, is going to be the place where you can flex the fastest. And so I’m hoping that community grows for our country so that we can flex as AI changes really quickly.

Brian Ledtke: So you think that the smaller schools are going to be set up the best for that then?

Jennifer Wolverton: Absolutely. It’s going to be micro-schools because they’ll have budgets that can handle the bigger. It’s very hard for me to do the things that I really want to do because I can’t afford a $20,000 humanoid in my classroom yet.

A public school could probably find a grant for that, and it’d be a little easier for them, and it would see more kids. Anyway, I have a harder time doing that. But a homeschooler who can flex as fast as a micro-schooler won’t have the spending ability that a micro-school will.

So the micro-school really sits in that middle zone where they’re small still, but they may have a little bit bigger budget so they can do some of this AI stuff a little faster and be more flexible.

Brian Ledtke: So what are some good ways for parents now of either kids in public schools or in micro-schools to get involved with training their children or regulating also to have too much time with AI? What are your thoughts on that?

Jennifer Wolverton: So there’s not a lot of great curriculum out there yet. One of the things we’re doing at MARS is we’re creating an AI unit studies series, and we’re trying to set it up so that they’re three weeks in length, and then we’re going to have like 20 different topics that you can pick from because everybody’s wondering about different things. Like some people just want to know about the ethics, and they just want to know that, and that’s all they’re ready for right now, and that’s totally fine.

So you’ve got to have a class on that. So we’re doing that. And then some people are, they just want to learn how to do cool art because AI really makes really cool art.

So we have a class coming on that. There’s not a lot of classes out there yet, but MARS is getting ready to put them out. So they’re welcome to come to our website, MARSmicroschool.ai, and they’ll be coming out any day.

Brian Ledtke: Another thing that I’ve heard, I’ve talked to parents about, and I have concerns about too, is that, and I can feel this too because I use Chat GPT for my work, that I feel like I’m not using my brain as much as I used to. So if we’re using AI a lot more, how do we make sure that we’re still flexing our brain muscles, and that we’re still learning, but also using this technology in a correct way?

Jennifer Wolverton: I think, you know when you go to the airport and you get on those conveyor belts that just make you walk really fast? I feel like that’s what AI is going to be like. I feel like we’re going to be able to write, right now we write five paragraph essays.

That’s what we do in America. But I think we’re going to be writing novels. And so instead of thinking like, I’m not going to be using my brain, we just need to do bigger things.

And instead of trying to like not use AI, just use it really great. But make your child think still. AI cannot write a novel.

And so if you tell, the first activity we do in AI Writers Guild is the one prompt novel. I try to get the kids to write a novel in one prompt. And they have so much fun designing this prompt.

They had so much fun, like this is the most fun thing for kids. And so they couldn’t do it, of course, because it only spits out what, 2,000 words at a time right now? And yeah, someday it may spit out a whole novel.

I don’t, I kind of hope it doesn’t. But someday it might. But the goal is to see that you can do bigger things now, and still, you’re still using your brain now.

Brian Ledtke: Do you have any cool stories of a student who came to MARS who was maybe struggling in school, or being interested at all in school, and doing the robotics and using AI really sparked an interest?

Jennifer Wolverton: Yeah, so I had one kid who came to me. Most of my kids had our special needs. But I had one child who was a kid with cerebral palsy.

And he struggled a lot with writing. He struggled with high school level work. But he was a high schooler.

And we were doing biology that year. And we were using a program called VictoryXR, who’s one of our endorsed curriculum. I totally recommend them as well.

And so you can actually go into VictoryXR now, and they have this thing called HoloTutor. And this is brand new. You put on the headset, go in, and you walk into this room, and the HoloTutor is standing there.

He can be programmed, he or she can be programmed to do anything, to teach anything. And so I had this student who struggled with learning at this high level, high school level science. But he spent hours designing this HoloTutor lesson.

And he learned high school level biology. And his mom came back to me pretty much crying and saying, I can’t believe this is working. But the accommodations that work for some of these kids truly are technology.

And so some of the stuff that we’re going to get into really does help that group of kids a lot.

Brian Ledtke: What’s your favorite new technology that you have used or you see coming very soon?

Jennifer Wolverton: It’s probably the quadrupeds. I really, really am excited about the quadrupeds. So kids do Lego robotics.

They do VEX robotics. But they’re not like having a robot dog. So it’s a four-legged, of course, dog.

So it has nine servo motors on it that you have. First you build the dog, and then you calibrate all of its joints because otherwise the dog will fall over. It has to be balanced.

So there’s this whole physics conversation about how heavy can the chassis be if you put the battery pack in and it’s this heavy and it has to be centered. So it’s a really great conversation just building the dog. But then you can program it to speak, to know when it’s about.

Like if you have it on a table, it can sense the end of the table and not to fall off of it. You can train them to talk. We’re going to connect it to an LLM and get the dog to talk.

I haven’t talked to him yet about my future goals for this project, but I’d really like to get the dog to be the mascot bot for MARS that tutors all the kids. And we can load up all of our curriculum into it. And it can chat with the kids about anything we’re studying.

Brian Ledtke: Wow. So this is going to be like at some point in the future, like new pets for kids then. That’s all very, very exciting and interesting.

Do you have anything last minute you want to leave with the listeners today?

Jennifer Wolverton: So I’d really like to let you guys know that we have a book that’s out called The AI-Driven Education Revolution. It’s all about our first year at MARS. And we’re just really looking to do some big things and be part of the future of education at MARS Microschool.

Brian Ledtke: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jennifer. Thank you for listening to this EdChoice Chats, and we’ll see you next time.