Intellect Inbox: Daily Bite-Sized Education for Parents
Introducing a new free service to help parents drive their kids' education
The Challenge and the Opportunity
About a year ago, I wrote about a couple ways that I was experimenting with using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to learn about different topics and to help kids.
In our case, we focused on using ChatGPT to create science experiments that could be done at home to help our nieces and nephews get a better sense of the world. They’ve been a hit, and we get frequent requests of “when is my next science experiment?”
This is an anecdote, but it highlights the incredible value that language models can bring to education if used well.
The dark side of LLMs in education is real: the easiest way to use ChatGPT in education is for students to outsource their homework, assignments, and almost anything else to ChatGPT, and copy the result back over.
But the incredible capabilities of these models can do so much more than that! They can customize the learning experience for the individual’s preferences. They can satisfy (and thus engender) endless curiosity. And they can break any topic down into small, digestible chunks.
However, using ChatGPT or any other LLM “the right way” takes a lot more effort. You have to think about how to craft the prompts, what questions to ask it, manage a few different threads, and more. It’s doable but there is enough resistance there that even my own motivation to learn in this way stagnated.
Going back to the science experiments: even though I had a great prompt crafted to generate them, my long-running thread would get lost in the shuffle of other threads. Starting a new thread (even with having a Custom GPT) would often lead to duplicate suggestions and a need to burn through several requests and several minutes to get a workable suggestion.
It’s not horrific, but for a busy parent juggling a job, child care, and everything else life throws at adults, it’s a lot to ask. Which brings us to…
Introducing Intellect Inbox!
Intellect Inbox is laser-focused on helping busy parents enrich their child’s education.
In concept, it’s simple: we send you an e-mail every morning with everything you need to help your child learn about it.
We explain the key concepts to you, suggest a strategy on how to introduce it to your kid and make it engaging for them, and then give you a few ideas for discussions, experiments, or assignments that could deepen your child’s understanding.
Like any good tool, Intellect Inbox is a force multiplier: with a quick ~3 minute read of an e-mail, you have all the info necessary to send your kid on several hours of engaging and educational journey!
We’re launching with 11 broad subjects, from Math and Science to History and Psychology. You can change your subject of choice at any time. So you can go with Science for a week or two, and then switch to History and engage there for a few days before moving on to Engineering. Want to cover essentials that aren’t taught in school (like Finance?) we’ve got you covered! And many more topics are on the way soon.
Each lesson is curated by the AI (currently, we are using GPT4), and so at this early stage there is varying quality. But as we continue to evolve our prompts, we expect the quality to get better and better. We also have systems in place to ensure a constant variety of topics and prevent repetition: a key challenge in providing regular learning.
Curious what this will look like?
Examples
To give you a sense, I wanted to share a few examples from our early testing. The three lessons below are from our Finance, Technology, and American Civics programs. Pick one you’d be curious about and take a look!
As a critical reader of these, I definitely spot areas where we can improve and expand what Intellect Inbox can offer (and of course we’ll be working toward that). But I’m also sure that the content and ideas from these lessons on a daily basis can help a ton of parents to spark genuine curiosity and discovery of knowledge for their kids right now.
Conclusion
While simple in concept, I am very excited about how this can empower parents to easily play an active role in their child’s education.
Even prior to Covid, our education system had been slowly getting worse as teachers are forced to teach to standardized tests and teach for the bottom of the class. Covid accelerated all the flaws and, for many, showcased just how bad our education system had become when they watched their kid’s remote classes.
Millions more parents have started homeschooling or taken a much more active role in their kid’s education.
Intellect Inbox will be here to help them.
We’re still finalizing a few things, so if you are interested please join our waitlist at www.mumma.co/intellectinbox! If you have kids between the ages of 6-12, we are looking for a handful of alpha testers, so please send an e-mail to ben@mumma.co if you’d like to try it out and help shape the future of the product!