When AI Outsmarts Mathematicians: What Happens to Maths Education?

0:13Dan Welcome to AI in Education podcast.

0:16 How are you, Ray?

0:17Ray I am well,

0:18Dan marathon runner.

0:19 Sorry. , Ray: Yes. I ran a marathon last weekend, and this weekend I fell off a rock. And so , for people on the wireless version of the podcast. I'm doing an impression of Gorbachev. Now that dates me. I've got this massive red bump on my forehead, where I landed on some soft ground on the softest bit of my body, which is my brain.

0:38 I'm fine.

0:39Dan Ouch.

0:39Ray But I'm bruised.

0:41 How about you, Dan?

0:42Dan In gardening Spring's coming in.

0:44 It's lovely. , But we've got a special guest today, right? We've got Rita Bateson from Eblana Learning, , coming up today, and she's dial in from where? Rita, welcome to the podcast.

0:55Rita Thank you so much.

0:56 I'm joining you from Dublin, Ireland, the capital centre of the country, but also probably one of the, the highest concentration of data centres. So I'm not, two miles away from AWS , and Microsoft and everybody else who has their headquarters here locally. So, , yeah, if I drop off it because we've lost electricity or signal, you'll know why.

1:16Ray Uh, hold, hold on.

1:18 You're next to a data centre. Data centres have these massive power backups and everything. What do you mean if you drop off?

1:25Rita They do.

1:25 They do. Unfortunately, , it is increasingly the case that high concentration of data centres does mean a, an increased demand on the grid. And as we know, , data centres require continuous energy, don't they? They need a constant supply. So we have noticed recently that it's increasingly, it's over 50% of the electricity in Dublin is now currently servicing the data centres, and it's higher where I am is 80% allegedly, although I'm trying to track down that data to an exact figure.

1:53 Mm-hmm. But I mean, and water is not an issue for us. We have plenty of rain, thank goodness. But it is interesting that there are competing demands on a very crumbling infrastructure. So it can be that we have the occasional ground out or blackout as a result. And also access to, . Broadband capacity, all of these things.

2:10 It's, it is interesting. I think , it's a taste of what's to come. Now obviously as we know, the, the models will get better and efficiencies will increase, and I'm very optimistic about these things. But there is a high, high level of demand and all of that demand has to be serviced somehow with compute or power, as they say.

2:26 And, it's an interesting time. Dublin is perhaps maybe just a little bit ahead of this. Of seeing what , the costs, the immediate costs of the data centre concentrations are.

2:34Ray This is fascinating.

2:35 This kind of makes it like living next to a railway line, but not a railway station, which is, you get all the inconvenience and none of the convenience . If you're getting power interruptions, if you're not getting great broadband, and yet there will be fibre and power highways flowing into the data centre next to you.

2:51 That's,

2:52Rita it's a, yeah, it's a very micro, for, I think , it's maybe a sign or a

2:56 superposition of ideas that we might see in the future happening elsewhere. We see this demand, there's a reason they're trying to put data centres in space, right? The, the hunger for this energy is high. So, yeah, it's interesting. We cannot afford, Ireland has been very dependent on foreign direct investments, so we can't afford to piss off any of the, um, the tech giants.

3:15 I forgot, sorry.

3:16Dan I was gonna , say that then, because.

3:17 Obviously we know this is large data centres and Republic of Ireland has been very, very forward thinking in terms of driving a lot of technology over the last. Several decades really. , And being able to be a hub , for a lot of the European Union and things like that, full large companies like Microsoft.

3:36 But then, on one hand you've got all of that. Then the next thing you've got the Guinness Brewery, the Liffy and, and Trinity library, which is like the best library I've ever been to in my life. So you've got the history and the technology that's lived side by side for quite some time, I suppose.

3:51Rita But I think that's a really nice message for the future, right?

3:53 So we have this legacy of tradition and a desire to innovate. If you were at Trinity, you probably saw the Book of Kells, which was this amazing technology of its time. You know, it was an incredible preservation of the past and a willingness to innovate. So I think we've been very lucky geographically, educationally, because we were a very, very poor country for a long time.

4:11 So, thanks to some, , forward thinking, a lot of bene, you know. Very beneficial and

4:15Dan musically on Grafton street there.

4:17 And she, this loop of pedal, the technology and the, , guitarist, uh, kind of. Was it kind of investments and things that they've done in electronics over the last few years has really pushed the brand. , But above yourself, Rita, you've got new lead of ethical AI for the international baccalaureate kinda group where you've been supporting those IB schools through, their thought processes around leading with ai.

4:40 You're an author, you're a speaker, you're a maths teacher. Tell us about your journey.

4:45Rita It's been, I suppose, a classic international school teacher journey.

4:48 I, I left Ireland to go to the UK , back in the days when there weren't any jobs here. I went to the UK, taught in the UK for a long time, got a bug for travelling, and , then started the international school hopping. They sometimes call it, I did, , Switzerland, Bermuda, Germany, did some time at the IB in the Hague, America.

5:04 I'm losing some country somewhere. And then , all the while developing mathematics and sciences curriculum, and assessment. And then came home in 2018 just in time to open an international school for the pandemic. , And so I'd love to see the governance side. Yeah, it was great. It was actually, we absolutely ballooned to be honest.

5:21 We went from very small to very large, very quickly.

5:23Ray Mm-hmm.

5:24Rita And I think that was the tech side of it.

5:26 I think people were very hungry for innovation and, , and respect for the classics. So , it was great. Then in 2023, of course, everything changed significantly, as we know, in education and as somebody who was both a writer and a curriculum and assessment, obsessive, I think AI felt like a bit of a, , existential threat to me and to my livelihood and to my world, first of all, and I avoided it as being a woman of a certain age.

5:51 I was like, I'm not going to get confused and drawn into this nonsense. But increasingly, all the research, all of the work that I was doing, the use cases, it led us to found this company to support and, develop ideas for the schools that didn't have the time to do the research. Or listen to podcasts like yourselves.

6:09 Or read the thousand articles that were reading all the time. Or fortunately, the Ray is reading for us and tells us about later on. You know, that is impossible to do in an already very busy school world. So it's, been beneficial from that side. And I have to say, the more research I do, the more schools we support, the more positive use cases I see.

6:27 And it helps to balance the P doom, the horrendous anxiety that some people are feeling or the overwhelm. So I find that's been really interesting. It's led me to think about what does curriculum truly need? What do schools actually need in this moment? How much of this is hype? How much of it is fear mongering?

6:44 How much of it is moral panic? How much of it is negligence if we're not engaging with it? And then from the electricity and energy side. Where are we sleepwalking into mistakes we've made in the past, such as with plastic or with social media? What can we glean from those? So it's been a really interesting journey.

7:02 I think I've been on the hype cycle myself more than once with AI. But it's certainly helped me to challenge my own thinking to get really excited about education again, which is really, you know, , it's wonderful to still be able to do that in my third or fourth decade of teaching to still be really excited and to still want - yeah - the best, and to still feel that optimism, even though the world sometimes conspires to make us feel less than optimistic.

7:29Ray It feels like it came earlier for some particular areas.

7:33 Written essays got overwhelmed by AI very, very quickly. Whe whether or not the teachers knew it. The kids knew it.

7:42Rita Yeah.

7:43Ray But it does feel like maths is one of those areas where it's.

7:50 It's not really had the same impact. I see a lot of research around, using it as a tutor in maths. Mm-hmm. As opposed to producing outputs and all that kind of stuff. But is that, has that changed,

8:05Rita I think it's changed significantly.

8:07 It's funny, I spent maybe the last two, two and a half years, as you did, wondering when it was going to bite. I mean, we had a stay of execution. I think as a maths teacher is where it was particularly bad at mathematics. Right. It was a large language model. And yes, simultaneously it was probably the sexiest thing that happened to maths for a very long time.

8:24 These are huge probabilistic machines. Like there's nothing more interesting now to teach about with probability than AI. And AI influenced decision making. Algorithmic thought like it's been an incredible boon for maths teachers. However, education, as we know, doesn't move at the speed of AI. So I think by the time that message was starting to get through to teachers, who were still very excited about the potential of AI as a tutoring tool.

8:50 , It's a unique subject, isn't it? Maths, there's no geography anxiety, there's no design anxiety, but you do get maths anxiety, and it's real, and it's credible and it's important. And math teachers don't suffer from it. And I think that's really important to remember. We have always been good at the subject.

9:07 We have the burden of knowledge. We don't really know what it feels like to struggle with the subject, and we're sometimes blind to that. And I think when AI was really bad at maths, it was easy to ignore and it was convenient to see ourselves as the experts still. Over the last couple of months, that is all out the window because of course it is now extremely capable of mathematics.

9:30 There was that threshold moment where I think, when it overtook humans in the International Olympiad, people sat it up and took notice at that point. But then in the last several months, certainly in September and October of 2026, those were breakthrough moments for mathematics. And I think math teachers and science teachers are starting to feel what everybody else has been feeling for the last two years.

9:52 It's really, really fascinating to see it happening in slow motion.

9:56Dan What are those breakthrough moments that have happened then?

9:59 And, I've seen certain things about medicine, and I've seen things, you know, I haven't looked closely about it, but where, , certain companies have said, Hey, we've cracked this particular theorem, or something that hasn't been resolved before. It was making me think of that fur much last, the book that was in the couple of decades ago with some mathematicians solved are things like that happening.

10:20Rita They are.

10:20 I mean, the world of mathematics is full of these teasers and problems that kind of remain unsolved, that offer million dollar prizes, or that offer incredible illustrious recognition. The Nobel Prizes of mathematics, like the Fields Medal for example. These are really, really prized kind of markers and benchmarks for AI.

10:41 And these Erdos problems or what, , any of these legacy problems that are sitting there unsolved. When AI, any version of AI purports to be able to solve it, it will cause ripples. And I think with the navier scopes, that was the very first one where suddenly it felt like, oh, this is real. This is genuinely going to be a tool that can solve.

10:59 Now whether that lasts over time, the fact that , there are people already saying, oh, but some of those results were taken from us inputting some of our ideas into AI and therefore, what is the attribution and what's the intellectual integrity there? I mean, that's an open question. Open AI, a little while ago, Just boom, released 70 solutions to incredibly challenging problems, the solutions that have never existed before as a human made solution.

11:24And the question becomes then how do we even verify them?

11:27 How do we know as humans who may or may not be able to follow this train of thought? How do we evaluate it? Are they operating at speeds that are way beyond us. Or. Are they hallucinating to a certain degree that we can't even catch up with? So it's really, it's fascinating to see that you can argue as to whether AI can be creative and truly write an essay or truly write a poem.

11:49 The mathematicians are experiencing that too now in their own way. It's really, really interesting that we see these vast proofs and that sometimes they're complete nonsense, but we don't realise it until we spend the time going through them line by line.

12:02Ray It's funny 'cause I remember seeing in the middle of October

12:04 reporting around aI doing one of the benchmark tests in maths and it got something like 80% correct. And when it was told it only got 80% correct, it was like, "Oh, hold on. There's some problems with the answers". And so they then went through it and realised that the mathematicians that created the tests had made some mistakes.

12:26 And once you allowed for that, it then got 98% correct. And so it's this really fascinating world where we have a belief that as humans, we don't fail. We've talked on the podcast before. 85% of drivers think they're an above average driver. Statistically it's impossible, but often we compare what AI does against a standard that is perfection, and we assume that humans do perfection.

12:52 And maths is a really good example of that, isn't it? Because it's a verifiable set of facts as opposed to an opinion. , And therefore, you know, gee, tech is coming for it.

13:05Rita But I think that's only true up to the limits of human knowledge.

13:09 Once we surpass that, how do we ever understand or how do we know, or how do we catch up to it with such a degree of certainty? And maths is all about certainty and uncertainty. Right. That is going to be really fascinating because you could see the mathematical community convulse around this. , They were so offended that OpenAI had to donate like 5 million towards mathematical charities and there were people refusing to engage with platforms.

13:32 You know, the real class. We know this historically from Luddite behaviour ways to push back against the system when your livelihood and your intellectual is threatened. So it is just, it's fascinating. I've spent my entire teaching career trying to get people into stem, trying to encourage, especially girls, especially minority students, to try and get more and more people into stem.

13:51 And now, for the first time in my life I'm thinking,

13:53Dan Hmm,

13:53Rita should I be, is this really where, the future jobs will be?

13:57 Is this really where the edge of of exploration will be? So I think… like I have an 11, I have 12-year-old now. She'll kill me for saying 11. I have a 12-year-old and I'm thinking. I've always tried to get her excited about engineering. I've tried to get her excited about mathematics and now I'm thinking, will that actually be valuable in the long term?

14:15 Will that be something? Will her capacity to be able to build worlds and create novel ways of exploring, will that be more valuable? Not that learning is always about value, but it is the first time in my life when I thought, "Hmm, will I with good conscience, advise people to go into mathematics now while it's in turmoil?"

14:32Dan Geez.

14:33Ray Yeah, it's interesting 'cause , it's almost like in the Middle

14:35 Ages, it was heresy to suggest that the earth rotated around the sun. Then we had a period where there were big theories, like e equals mc squared and things like that, that were theories that were only became provable later. We might be in a current situation with that, but… That, that's really interesting though, because then that kind of goes to the.

14:58 Way that we feel about ai.

15:02Rita Hmm.

15:02 , Ray: It's not just a science thing, it's a, feeling thing. I, , you mentioned it before we started and, uh, Dan and I have both had the same experience. , When you go to a social event and people go, ah, just the person I wanna ask you about ai, like, what's going on?

15:21Rita In terms of the sensitivity around it or in terms of the emotions?

15:26 Yeah, it's really interesting 'cause we work with many, many schools and lots of parents, obviously lots of student panels, lots of teachers. And you see the usual spectrum of those who are terrified and or hate it, and I'm seeing that much more in the 17 to 25-year-old category. People who are genuinely angry about ai.

15:44 Who resent it for whatever reason, whether it's creativity, whether it's the future of work, whether it's environmental reasons, genuinely angry. And angry at themselves for continuing to use it. That's a really interesting phenomenon. I've seen, um, with parents, you know, people who have people my age, around my age who have like teenagers and they're worried about AI or they're, , the same kind of questions we got 10 years ago with social media, for example.

16:09 So I think we see a level, high level of anxiety across the board. It does correlate. It's really interesting. It peaks and troughs depending on their exposure to ai. Like I find that people want to have a very different conversation with me if they are working at the edge of a agentic AI. They wanna talk about power and potential, risk and vulnerabilities.

16:29 People who are just dipping their toe into the answer box level of AI, they wanna talk about like, how do I protect cognition and how do we think about creative thinking?

16:37Dan Mm.

16:38Rita Teachers run the entire gamut, don't they?

16:40 We, we go from. Everything, which this could save me time to. This is draining my time. And that's really interesting where you tend to see trends around different subjects. Like I said, maths, we were a little bit obnoxious because it wasn't going to threaten us for a long time. Lang and Lit or English teachers were worried about essays.

16:57 There're very definite trends. But interestingly enough, when it's the students who are probably the most sensitive to AI slop at the moment, I dunno if you noticed this too. It's like modern art. You know? They know it. When they see it, they can just say it's AI straight away. And I don't hear kids ever say CGI.

17:15 I don't hear them say Photoshop. Everything's just AI. It's a blanket amorphous term for them. And I think that's really interesting. The number of kids who I hear say. "If I wanted AI feedback, I could get that myself. I wanted you to read my work. I wanted you to see me. Even ironically, if I used ai, I still wanted you to value me as a person".

17:38 I hear a lot of kids who are worried about their parents believing everything about ai, whether it's positive or negative, and they have a much more nuanced view. They feel. Then the older generation, which reminds me how I felt. It's a really interesting point. Yeah. Really interesting. I, I actually felt so bad.

17:53 I laughed out loud the first time a kid said, I'm worried about my parents' critical thinking, because I thought, oh, that's exactly what we say about you guys. And so there's a common shared concern there. Um, I had to laugh. There was another girl who told me, she said, "I just wish my mother remembered Google still existed, because she'll take a photograph of the fridge and she'll just ask it to give her a recipe.

18:13 And she's like, there are already recipes that have been tried and tested by humans, and instead, I have to eat AI slop. And I was like, it was fantastic. So they're very sensitive. They're very sensitive about it. And they do feel, as we know, students of all ages, but particularly teenagers, have a heightened sense of injustice.

18:32 And whether it's a maths teacher, whether it's an English teacher, a history teacher. If they're not disclosing and being very transparent about what they're using AI for. I see certain students just shut down and just say, "that's just ai". And the word just is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It tells me that it, you know, it really does affect how they regard and respect a teacher's honesty, how they regard and respect potential hypocrisy around the use.

18:58 And I think they are crav to talk about it. It's really like they say they're tired of it. They're sick of hearing about ai, they're sick of seeing ai, but they're cravings to be led and directed, and I think that's really important. We had. A course where we were looking at students could direct their own learning through AI or teacher led sessions, and we hoped that teacher led sessions would mutually uplift both parties.

19:21 The teachers were too exhausted, they wanted the students to do it on their own, and the students were saying: "But we wanna have these conversations. We want to be in the moment. We don't wanna be only on screen learning about ai. We want to collectively build our values". And that gave me incredible hope and optimism.

19:36 It made me feel sorry for the teachers who were too tired to engage with it, but it is, it's really interesting that, I mean, the kids have, I really enjoyed , the series that you were doing, listening to students and talking to students, because their views are so much more mature and nuanced than we give them credit for.

19:52 They're much more discerning, I think, and that they're not getting enough fuel for that discernment.

19:58Dan Yeah.

19:58 Yeah. Thanks for listening to that, series because we found that fascinating as well of, I think possibly we need to keep doing that. , And listening to students and seeing where they, uh, views change. It is very difficult , in any of this space to speak to realists around what's going on because every, if you ask a teacher, let's get some students on to chat about it.

20:19 They're always the positive kids that have got. Three ais that they're using on their mobile phones. , It's not really getting into the equity piece and it's in everybody and we, it's often skewed towards positivity and the way they use it in an amazing way. So it, it is really refreshing to hear about that kind of discern ability around the technology that see in, in, in classrooms.

20:43Rita They are.

20:43 I mean, they will often tell you their favourite model and they'll give you great reasons for their favourite model. They'll often tell you why they're angry at AI and give you very detailed descriptions. But for me, I think it's really interesting that… I think it was Google who had a survey recently where 30% of kids said that their trusted source of truth or understanding around AI was their parents.

21:04 And I never would've predicted that. So I think they are looking to us for some level of guidance, even if they look like they're not listening. I think that's really important to

21:11Dan Yeah, that's a concern in itself 'cause a lots of parents

21:15 have got no idea about AI and are often, , confused about what is ai, you know, multiple times there. I get asked by genuine adults about, is this an ai? Is this video ai? Do you think on Facebook? What do you think that is? And , kids think they can guess it, like you said, and adults think they can guess what AI is this.

21:33 It's a very interesting time with us.

21:35Rita And right.

21:35 Ray, you've referred to a lot of studies where

21:38Dan Yeah.

21:39Rita You know, people think that they can identify it much better.

21:41 Right. I mean, that's, that's really interesting. And yet students, when I ask 'em to explain how or why or what markers, it's so ingrained, like they almost can't articulate why it is. So it comes across as just suspicion. It comes across as kind of an arrogance around us, but it's not at all. I mean, they will come up with incredibly complicated algorithms as to how to humanise.

22:01 If I ask 'em what humanizer they're using, they'll say, "oh, I'm not". And then I'll say, "what are your friends using?" And they'll tell me exactly in which order. , And change the fourth word here and put a spelling mistake in there. I mean, these are old tricks that we know from copy and paste days, but every generation reinvents it for themselves.

22:18 The only difference I think this time is the media amplification of fear. When they came back after the last couple of breaks. Seeing headlines around agents hacking out of their sandboxes, and hearing 10% of chances of doom and all of these things. That is starting to impact some students really harshly to adults too, to be honest.

22:39 But I think we have a moral duty to those kids to kind of say, you know, these are… one perspective. These are, maybe hype around pre-selling or pre IPO stages. We need to give them a little bit more contextualization because kids can internalise that very, very deeply. And we've given them a level of climate anxiety.

23:00 We've given them a level of environmental anxiety. I hate to watch us repeat the same mistakes again, and give them AI anxiety. When the future is so uncertain and hopefully there are grownups worrying about those things for them. So I think in any good curriculum, if people are starting to think about embedding AI literacy, and AI ethics and curriculum, getting the balance right is key.

23:20 Making sure the students are not overly fearful. That they're not overly enthusiastic. That they're very measured in their adoption and approaches. I think that's the most important thing right now for anyone developing curriculum or assessment. And,

23:32Ray And I think you're absolutely right, it's that we're still

23:35 in the development stages. , You talked earlier about the pace of change. I can't keep up, like I just can't keep up with what is happening. And my habits are emerging still. I saw somebody said the old world was TL;DR too long, didn't read The New World is AI;DR. And it's absolutely right. I, I don't read meeting summarise that come from ai.

23:57 Because my judgement is that an individual didn't take a look at this and decide whether this action list actually is the real action list, and it's in the right order, and all that kind of stuff. So it's almost like we are raising ourselves to get to this stage of ignoring. And yet I will use it very enthusiastically as a thinking partner to take my thinking to a higher level.

24:19 And so. It's actually challenging me to be cognitively better rather than switch off. But that honesty piece is really important. If you're a student in a student teacher relationship, there's a level of trust that goes on in there that the teacher trusts, that the work that you've produced has helped you learn something, and you've put some brain work into it, and the student.

24:43 Trust that the feedback they get from a teacher has had some work in it. Now, the unfortunate thing is I don't think many students understand that teachers have 30 in their class, which means, you know, two episodes of EastEnders is: one minute to read the essay, one minute to scribble a mark, and, and a short bit of feedback.

25:02 So you can improve that process. with AI, but don't pass it off as your own work. Like I, I feel like give the feedback tool to the student and say, "Hey, before you get ready to hand in your essay, run it through this and it'll give you some feedback and make a decision about whether you want to accept some of that feedback or not".

25:20 Is more honest than the teacher running it through the tool and giving it back to the student afterwards. 'cause that's replicating today's model in a new way with less effort. There are so many things that have relied on people putting effort , into it to get the end result. And now we're in a situation where you don't need to put any effort in to get the end result, and that is gonna change the way we think about things.

25:45 Especially in education, I.

25:49Rita I think I agree with almost all of that, except for the fact that

25:52 when I speak to students and they moan about, and I use moan endearingly now, affectionately, when I ask them like what it is that they wish their school knew about AI or that their parents understood of AI, it's really interesting to hear those students who say, I can go from class to class and see identical Claude slides or AI slop and feel that I'm just, I'm, that that person didn't care enough about me to prepare a lesson plan, or to prepare a teaching resource.

26:17 And I don't like, you don't, you know how long it takes to prepare teaching resources and it will never look as professional as this. And I say to them, "ah, yes. That frequent exposure that you're seeing is the same feeling a teacher gets when they sit down to mark 20 AI essays." You see the penny drop, and you see that idea that, okay, exposure cultivates taste.

26:36 And actually, that I think is really positive - that the more you see of AI slop as opposed to AI quality, your taste calibrates and students really do internalise a sense of locus, or a quality expectation, that may or may not be right. Yeah. It may not be that they're, yeah. That they're attuning it properly.

26:53 But I've just been really heartened by hearing kids express to me what it is they do and don't like about AI products or AI resources or AI thinking. Like, I'll have a student who can say to me all kinds of like, hilarious ai. They're, they're talking about leveraging, they're learning. And, you know, they're, they're using navigate all the time within their language.

27:10 That their language is moulding itself around AI language, which is, is slightly worrying, I think. But they will tell me, they'll say essentially. What they want to see from teachers, what they want, whether they can express this fully or not, is they don't want to open up a report and have similar, well-crafted, convincing slick comments that don't speak to them at all.

27:32 That has no bearing or relevance to who they are as a person, or who are they are as a learner. They'd rather have less, but more personal, than have longer. Yeah. And I think that's something that we're seeing so much. That's

27:42Dan fascinating, isn't it?

27:43 You mentioned earlier on there about the curriculum part of this, right? And the fact that curriculum are being redeveloped. So you're looking at IB specifically quite a lot. I'm sure you look at other curriculums as well. , And I'm just listening to you and, and knowing just generally above the technology in the background as well.

28:00 I think maths is where this can land quite well. 'cause ultimately it is mathematical, it's all got algorithms. When we started this podcast, we were talking about a, it was an AI and education podcast before Gen ai. We should really call it the Gen AI and Education podcast, but when we started this, it was very much around algorithms and things like that, which sit exactly in the space where maths is.

28:24 . I suppose the negativity around gen AI and maths, and technology generally in maths, has always been really around, actually semi fundamental. It's not, it's been difficult in with a computer to actually show something as simple as a square root or a cube root or whatever, because you've gotta change the notation.

28:43 And even if you're generating an image mathematically, it's quite hard to get, a square root sign in there or whatever. . And that's getting better. So I suppose , we are in this position where curriculum's being redesigned. I think the curriculum in new softwares in Australia has just been redesigned in, in the maths curriculum.

29:00 They've now added data science. So there's a big uproar here of like IT teachers going, hold on, data science is now in the maths curriculum. What's going on here? Whereas they've been doing data science and data modelling and maths for a while, right. So I suppose. That's just summarising what I'm seeing anecdotally around the area.

29:19 Are you seeing something different with the IB and other courses? Is because it, for me, it just does lend itself to it, you know, all of this stuff.

29:28Rita Mm-hmm.

29:28Dan It, it goes all the way down to the ethical side of

29:30 it, and when you pay that back. You know, you can start, you can bring maths into it every time, can't you? I don't really know what I'm asking you, but that's the anecdote that I'm seeing, from my view of going in and speaking to teachers and what I've observed. What are your thoughts on curriculum?

29:47 And how it all connects together. And is this a resurgence from a maths point of view? And I know we're going through first part of this, but you did mention curriculum so that it's, let's go for it.

29:56Rita I did, because I said earlier, I think this is one of the sexiest

29:59 things to happen to mathematics in a long time, but I think we saw the clues were here all along because in 2016, anyone who's familiar with , the IB or British curriculum, for example. They're broken into age appropriate phases. Right. And in the IB world and the international baccalaureate world, there's a Middle Years programme from 11 to 16, which is very similar to many mathematics programmes around the world from 11 to 16, because we want them to know the geometry, trigonometry.

30:24Dan Mm-hmm.

30:24Rita You know, number in algebra and so on.

30:26 And then there are two years of the diploma programme. And in 2016, I wrote the last MYP mathematics guide. I had to push quite hard to get algorithms in there and big data in there, we could see these things coming and becoming really important. Mm-hmm. I had to put networks back in. They'd been taken off for years, and I just had a sense that although critics would say, oh, but that's just the, the cool term of the day.

30:47 Everybody wanted to be a data scientist in 2016 to 2020, didn't they? Because that was where the big money was going to be. Mm. And, uh, there was a sense that maybe I was just following the wind or it was group think, I'm really glad it it was in there and it stays in there. I think because , the brain is a pattern processing machine.

31:03 Mathematics is all about patterns, pattern identification. But you could make a similar argument for all subjects because I would also argue that any. The only person who can get good writing out of AI is a good writer themselves. And the people who can recognise great writing and great work out of AI is a great thinker.

31:20 And so those skills are eternal. Mm-hmm. Those skills are really important. A varied vocabulary when AI comes and claims a word for its own like shift. I can't use the word shift anymore 'cause it's flipping everywhere. You need to then have a depth of field of knowledge to be able to draw from and to be so specific in your language and to be so varied in your language.

31:38 So every subject still has a great deal to bring to the table for science, for example, this whole idea of hypothesis testing and remaining open-minded and using the uncertainty principles. These are really, really important. There isn't a single subject that hasn't been impacted by AI, and that can't serve our understanding of AI.

31:55 I think that is something that really makes me feel very positive about the future of education. But when it comes to mathematics, I think. There are two separate things happening. The assessment side, the actual interacting with tools is still done on paper. People still want to be able to scribble.

32:11 They still, it's very, as you said, it's very difficult to format mathematics on screen quickly and fluently and in maths automaticity is really important. Kids have to be fast and capable in an assessment situation. So onscreen is going to be a challenge. I think it's one of the reasons why it will be the last subject in the IB to go onscreen.

32:30 We are working currently, um, I'm very fortunate to be part of the team who are working on a DP data science course, data Science and Society. So it'll be interesting if it has the same reaction as Australia. Mm-hmm. Because there are many, many kids who are mathematically homeless right now. Math understanding of the real world is going to be more important, not less important over time.

32:51 So if AI impacts our lives in so many ways, if we allow it to make decisions for humanity or for individuals. Kids need to be able to understand that. They need to be able to at least have an understanding of algorithmic manipulation, about probabilistic determination. There's so much that math teachers can bring to the party, but because we are maybe 18 to 24 months behind everybody else, it not having been our problem till now, I think we've got some work to do to catch up.

33:17Ray It's, that is absolutely fascinating because that whole conversation makes

33:22 me think we're in a world where. Maths is taking over. And yet what you've just said there is the kind of maths teaching, you know, the leaders of maths. , Only just catching up, but in fact, the whole of the rest of our world has been taken over by maths because we've discovered that writing and all that kinds of other things is just a probability machine that can be , run by maths.

33:47 It's scary. It's, it's really scary. We'll look back on this time as such a disruptive time.

33:52Rita I think so, but also you could make a similar argument for physics, right?

33:55 This whole, the move towards embodied AI with robotics is so physics dependent. So the people who truly understand physical representation within three dimensional worlds and prompting of those three dimensional worlds will need the artists and the niche knowledge. People will need historians to be able to create those worlds.

34:13 We will need physics in every sense, because all of those models fail, right? If they don't have the physics right. You can tell straight away the uncanny valley, if anything is off according to our geometrical, you know, our 3D world understanding, people pick it up straight away. They're so sensitive to it.

34:28 So I think totally. Now you can make an audience

34:30Dan book.

34:30 Let's like Assassin's Creed. Right. I remember when that game came out, when people were asking me what careers and things like that, I'd bring Assassin's Creed up and go look. They've had to get religious scholars to talk about the historical and religion inside the game. They've had to get physicists and geological experts understand the physics of water.

34:50 So often games development in that 3D world has brought those domains together to, to excel. So I suppose that can be extrapolated into this AI area as well.

35:00Rita An ethicist and anthropologist?

35:02 We made fun of my brother for years, we're being an anthropologist. And now look at him. He's, he's busier than he ever was, right?

35:08Ray Mm. , Where are we gonna put the next 24 hours of this podcast?

35:11 Because this is a conversation that is never gonna end. We do. Ha. We do have to end it. But I've taken away a whole load of things. The, the really interesting thing that, the penny had not dropped for me, is that the mathematicians thought that the AI stuff wasn't changing for them in the way that it was changing, the humanities and things like that.

35:33 That is just fascinating 'cause, 'cause I just think of it as being central rather than on the edge. So that's fascinating. It's also interesting to see what comes next and I love. The AI lop can actually be stuff you eat as well as stuff you read. That is scary,

35:50Rita isn't it?

35:50 , Ray: Because I know I have produced AI slop.

35:54Dan I think we, we have to, um, rename the, the podcast that

35:56 like, , quantum in Education next. 'cause that'll be the next thing the maths is gonna change the world for, isn't it? So if you've gotta end on a couple of go dos. Rita, what would you suggest schools will listen to this can go do, tomorrow to keep leading the way or even start in their journey?

36:16Rita I think more detailed discussion.

36:18 We advocate for a lot of discussion. Right. But I think detailed discussion because subjects have such subject specific domain understandings of what's important. You might be an economics teacher, and it's okay to allow AI to graph for you. But for a math teacher that is absolutely sacrosanct, we want them to be able to, for whatever reason and whatever value determinations we make, we want them to be able to create graphs and have proportional reasoning and understand relationships.

36:42 So I think. With everything. And I don't wanna do any disrespect to my math teachers 'cause they will get me after this. Mm-hmm. But I think we have used AI maybe for generating test questions or maybe occasionally for marking, and then we walked away from it by saying it is not as good as as it could be.

36:58 I think now's the time to come back to what was fresh eyes. I think one of the things I have found fascinating is I have, you're probably the same from your teaching days. I have folders and folders of resources that I assumed I would never open again. That I would never use photographs of, , screenshots of things that I never revisited.

37:13 I've just set up my Claude agent to go in and comb through my back archive and look for new, fresh ideas that I've forgotten about, never developed, never thought about. And like there's so much creativity there that's going untapped. I had a moment where I was like, oh, that bi building is fascinating.

37:29 I should use it for an assessment. And that was in 2003. I've never looked at it again. For the first time in my life, those ideas are coming together in a way that isn't. Wow, breaking my back in the way that isn't cognitively challenging me. It's going, here's my curriculum. I'm reworking the textbook at the moment.

37:44 So I was looking for some interesting and fresh ideas to click open each of those folders would've taken me years. But to allow AI to go in and in a very low risk, kind of low stakes way. Wow. To build something different and incredible. That is eye-opening. Now, how do I offset that energy? 'cause I have intense Catholic guilt around that.

38:02 So I'm gonna have to go and plant, I plant about 85 sunflowers , for every 10 hours of Claude use, which is not a sustainable habit, but it is. It's the only way I can feel better about the energy that I know I'm consuming. So I think that's something to think about. What I would ask is, if you're a math teacher or a non mathematician, think about ways that you can use AI in.

38:23 Ways that don't remove marking and lesson planning, because those things make us great teachers. Let's think about the ways of unexplored avenues, unexploited opportunities that we've always wanted to do, but never had the time to. That's where AI could really, really help us.

38:37Ray Brilliant.

38:37 Thank you. Thank you

38:39Dan so much,

38:40 . Ray: Yeah. Great conversation. I learned so much from that conversation. Thank you so much for sharing everything.

38:45Rita Well, I've, I've learned so much from you too, just from constant

38:47 listening, so I, I really appreciate the chance to come in and when maths eventually wins the subject wars. Can I come back again?

38:53Dan Yes, absolutely.

38:54 Thanks for

38:56Ray joining us.

38:57Rita Thank you.