NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. — Some of us only remember classrooms having chalkboards or whiteboards.

What You Need To Know

  • Pepin Academies in New Port Richey is utilizing AI to help students answer questions and teachers plan lessons

  • The programming comes from Scholar Education, which now has its program helping 4,000 students in six different schools

  • A teacher who uses the resource at Pepin says the AI has helped her with student data collection that is required to see their progress in school

  • Dayspring Academy also uses this program

It was a simpler time that Amy McBride saw when she started teaching in the 1990s.

“There was no internet,” said McBride, who teaches U.S. History at Pepin Academies in New Port Richey. “So, I tell the kids I'm like, yeah, I went to college, there's no internet and they're like, how did you do anything?”

It’s wild to think of a time when the internet wasn’t our go-to for everything and in the modern classroom, laptops and tablets are as ubiquitous as pencils.

But something new is joining the curriculum at Pepin Academies and that’s BaxterBot.

“He’s our AI,” McBride said. “And we just click it and they can ask him any question.”

Think of him like a teacher’s assistant.

When the kids are working on an assignment and, say, McBride is busy helping one specific student, the other kids can ask Baxter their question and he will either answer it or pose another question to get the kids thinking toward the right solution.

“In the beginning they would ask, and he would just give them the answer,” she said. “Then he catches on that they’re not thinking it on there, and he’ll go, well, what do you think?”

This programed pup comes from Scholar Education, which uses the likeness of two dogs, Baxter and Professor Bruce, to help the students with their coursework.

It also helps McBride with lesson planning and data collecting.

“It makes my data crunching at that time of year when, you know, we’re also doing exams and end of the course, you know, all the stuff they ask for us above and beyond the classroom,” McBride said. “It helps with that considerably.”

That’s why McBride thinks AI like this isn’t detrimental to learning, because she says it actually helps students who may be shy and don’t want to speak up to ask questions, while also assisting kids with learning disabilities.

“Never did I think I’d be, you know, relying on a dog to help me teach my class or help my students answer their questions,” McBride joked.

But now that Baxter and Bruce are there, McBride says it has made the modern classroom an even better learning environment.

McBride says this is the first semester she has implemented the program into her teaching.

Aside from Pepin Academies in New Port Richey, Dayspring Academy is also using Baxter and Bruce.