Formative and AI: An Interview with Carlo Schmidt (Part 1)

From its inception, Formative has strived to marry cutting-edge technology with active educational engagement. All its features - Show Your Work, Teacher Paced Mode, and the varied question and response types - supercharge the learning experience. Teachers can rely on the platform to save them time while still hewing to state and district curriculum standards, and students have a resource that differentiates to exactly where they are on their learning journeys.

And now Formative is bringing this mission to the next level. Over the next few weeks, the platform will be rolling out exclusive new AI integrations, courtesy of its engagement with ChatGPT. Special early-access members have already begun Beta-testing these new developments, but eventually all Formative users will see how AI can revolutionize teaching and learning.

We met with Formative’s Director of Product Carlo Schmidt to talk about how Formative has brought AI into the platform. Carlo discussed the company’s motivations guiding AI integrations, the controversies behind AI in general, and why teachers - and everyone else! - shouldn’t fear the new “intelligence” in the classroom.

We’re proud to present Part One of a four-part interview series. During this portion, Carlo relates the origin story of how Formative first got involved with AI and then details the first few integrations that users will encounter.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Formative Team: From your perspective, when did Formative first start really talking about AI integration?

Carlo Schmidt: We've always thought about integrating AI inside the platform. To a certain extent, we were waiting for the moment when AI caught up to what we were capable of doing with it in the product. And that was what you've seen happen in recent months with ChatGPT and some of the other AI things that have been released. They work really well, and they can actually help our teachers now at this point, whereas before it would have been, for lack of a better word, somewhat of a gimmick to include it in the product. Now we're solving teacher problems with it.

Formative Team: What are the first forward-facing AI Integrations that Formative users are going to see?

Carlo Schmidt: We're taking a cautious approach: we recognize that there's a lot of mixed sentiment around AI among educators. Every teacher I talk to, if I bring up AI, the first thing they think about is, “Are students cheating?” They're concerned that students won't have to think anymore in their class and can just use the AI to submit things. Our framework is, how can we use AI to help unlock productivity for the teacher and make the teacher more productive? Everything we're doing as we're thinking about AI right now is, how we can shave off a couple minutes here, a couple seconds here, a couple hours here, for educators and learners so they can spend that time focusing on how best to support one another's needs in the classroom.

Formative Team: And how will Formative’s AI integrations support that mission?

Carlo Schmidt: Our first foray into AI was doing AI-generated hints for questions. We did that because even without the AI, that's a massive value-add for our teachers. Teachers have wanted to be able to provide hints to students so they can try to figure out the problem if they’re struggling. When we saw that AI existed, we were like, “Maybe we can deliver hints in a way that teachers can create them easily and use AI to generate them?”

The second foray we've taken is, how can we use AI to help the teachers to generate content for their classroom? A lot of teachers get their content from the curriculum, and a lot of times, they’re just coming up with stuff themselves on the fly to try to assess students on particular concepts. We thought the next logical step into AI and helping folks to save time would be letting them generate questions based off topics or standards or really whatever they want. Our teachers that use Formative spend an inordinate amount of time on that edit page. They're creating from scratch or they're transferring [content] from paper. This is one way that we can start to chip away at that time and give [it] back to teachers by using AI itself.

Join us next week for Part 2 of this interview, where Carlo will discuss all the ways that his team engineered Formative’s AI integrations so that they work for teachers, rather than in place of teachers.