Hi! I'm Elizabeth (one of the co-founders of Ello). This is an interesting question. I actually think there is more overlap than people might assume, but it's a bit more because adaptability to various approaches to learning is part of the point. While I'm not deeply familiar with the Sudbury School model, I think there are various approaches to teaching kids that are successful because different approaches serve different types of kids and learners. I can see why this approach would be successful for a certain profile of student for whom it's the right fit.
We start from the belief that children are naturally curious. Our job is to build something engaging enough that a child wants to interact with it because it is interesting and rewarding. If a child in a Sudbury environment never chose to use it, I would see that as useful feedback for us, not a problem with the child. There are opportunities for kids to explore and incorporate their interests within our app.
I also think it is completely fine if a child uses it for a while, disappears for months, and comes back. Learning is rarely linear, and technology should be able to pick up wherever the child is.
On reading, we’re firmly grounded in the science of reading, so we teach through explicit phonics rather than whole-word memorization because that is best practice.
On math, we’re much more interested in helping children build intuition and conceptual understanding than simply getting answers. AI gives us the flexibility to use conversation, visual models, stories, or symbolic math, depending on what helps a particular child understand.
One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are. A 10 year old who is learning to read should not have to work through material that feels like it was made for preschoolers. The underlying concepts can stay the same while the language, topics, and presentation become age appropriate.
I don’t think there is one educational model that works for every child. What excites me is that AI makes it much more feasible to adapt to individual learners instead of expecting every learner to adapt to the same experience.
Thanks for replying. Glad to hear you use phonics. It sounds like it could have a lot of potential and I intend to pass it along to our community. If you would like to possibly explore its use in a Sudbury community, you can send an email to my gmail account which is the same username as listed here.
>> children figure out what they want to do and the learning comes along with it; the model views adults wanting children to learn something specific as generally counterproductive
> One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are
What if the AI wanted children to learn something specific? Able to patiently await an opportune moment. Able to blend it invisibly into other material. Able to subtly check and correct understanding.
Long term, one possibility is AI enabling a massive implicit curriculum. "[A]dults wanting children to learn" about say street crossing might be counterproductive... but funny how, at opportune times, some random stories just happen to include crossing a street, and do formative assessment, and happen to, quietly and eventually, cover and reinforce the associated learning objectives.
Take How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, a children's picture book inoculation against natural selection misconceptions. It could merely be a book on a shelf. Or the AI might introduce or provide the book at an opportune moment. Or the book's approach itself might be dissolved and blended into other content.
So some story is explicitly about Fido going for a walk. But implicitly, it covers some aspect of safely crossing a street, and street lights as a communication device, and of concrete crack propagation, and tick precautions, and natural selection, and ...
Science is a richly interwoven tapestry of stories... but we basically never teach it like that. Even if such material was gathered, which pre-AI was absurdly implausibly demanding of domain expertise, it would largely be beyond the capability of an individual tutor to compellingly and adaptively deliver. But with AI?
I have a child who has to use a speech board to communicate. Will Ello adjust itself to work with a non-verbal child? If not, is that in the plans?