I Made an AI Tutor to Help My Kids Get Better Grades

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Domanski, 41, the director of business management and development at Renau, a manufacturing facility in California. He and his family live in Thousand Oaks, California. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

More than anything, ChatGPT has saved me time and drama by being a study partner for my kids.

What spurred this were the progress reports that my daughters, ages 8 and 6, got from school last year. I found out that one struggles with math, and one struggles with reading. Not that they’re doing poorly, but maybe below where the district thought that they should be.

I knew we could try to spend more time on these areas. But at the end of the day, I thought I might not be the best person to explain a concept like TouchMath, a multi-sensory math curriculum, which I’d never heard of until I had to help the girls with homework.

I decided to take a picture of their homework and have AI explain some concepts to them. Using voice mode, ChatGPT now quizzes them, varies the questions, revisits what they missed, and explains the same concept several different ways without becoming impatient.

At first, I wasn’t sure if the time it took to set this up was worth it. Five minutes in, they were talking to ChatGPT about “KPop Demon Hunters.” I needed to revise it a little.

Through trial and error, it became something that really saved time and I think improved their grades. I’m not sure how it’s going to look as things get more and more complicated with their schoolwork, but at least for now, it works well.

I programmed an AI tutor to make sure they truly understand the material

Both my daughters have weekly math and spelling tests at school.

In general, I tell ChatGPT what kind of test my daughters are preparing for, take a picture of the study sheet, and instruct it to stay focused — despite the inevitable interruptions by my daughters.

I prompt ChatGPT by saying something like: “You’re a tutor helping grade schoolers study for math and spelling tests. You’ll be given images of the study guides, and you’ll work with the students until they can confidently and accurately answer all questions.”

I also add some guardrails: “You will not be distracted if other topics come up. Express interest in those topics, make them relevant to what you’re discussing, but keep it on the task at hand.”

Many of the instructions are for ChatGPT to politely and firmly make sure my daughters are comfortable and confident in the material, not engaging just for the sake of engaging. If they’re able to quickly say what 9+3 is, they’re able to write that on a test.

I also make sure I’m present to hear both what they’re saying and what ChatGPT is saying. If I hear that something is very clearly wrong, I can jump in and steer things back to the task at hand.

Overall, AI has been pretty efficient at maintaining their attention, adapting to how they are thinking in that moment, and repeating something for the sixth time without making it feel like punishment. It’s surprisingly useful at absorbing some of that friction.

Since last year, their progress reports went from being a little “below satisfactory” to being “above satisfactory.” Both of their grades have improved, but the more valuable result may be that studying has become more interactive and less adversarial. I am still involved, but I can spend more time observing where they are struggling instead of simply reading questions from a worksheet.

I also use AI to digitize their school handouts into a calendar

AI also helps me manage the constant stream of information that comes with having two grade-school children.

Every Monday, I open their take-home folders and take pictures of school flyers, calendars, permission slips, and classroom notices, then use ChatGPT to extract dates, deadlines, supplies, and action items. It turns paperwork that would otherwise require another round of mental sorting into something much easier to track.

The prompt I use is: “You’ll be given images of take-home folders. Please review this for key dates and things that require action or follow-up on behalf of anyone. Add relevant tasks to my calendar.” ChatGPT then exports the scanned events as .ics files that I then import into a school calendar in Outlook.

At this point, ChatGPT hasn’t really dropped the ball. It is really nice not to discover at 8 p.m. that there is a project due the next morning — and then spend the rest of the evening scrambling to figure out what we need.

AI frees me up to have more fun with my kids

We also do quite a bit of generative art, asking ChatGPT to provide an image for my daughters to draw on their own.

Originally, we’d ask for something like Disney’s Ariel and Elsa dancing underwater in a sandcastle. ChatGPT declined the request, citing copyright restrictions. I asked it to provide an open-source alternative, such as a generic red-headed mermaid and blonde ice princess. Everyone was happy.

Now, a few times a week, my daughters can draw or paint whatever character crossover they want.

AI does not so much create new free time as help us get much more out of the time we already have. We spend less time looking for things, figuring out instructions, or trying to understand a new concept from scratch, and more time actually doing projects, making art, playing games, or just having fun together.