← All work

Teacher's companion

in build

A program that remembers every class and prepares lessons from the textbook together with the teacher. It sees the page, suggests how to run each task and says why. The teacher decides.

The assembled lesson: slide thumbnails on the left, a map game called Hide the treasure in the centre, and below it instructions for the teacher with two tags from the class journal.
The lesson as designed. The green tags are notes from the class journal.

How a lesson is prepared

1 · Teachershows exercise 8 to the camera and asks: “How should we do number eight?”by voice
2 · Companion“6B already know this map: last lesson they listened to a dialogue on it. Role-play, or a game?”from the class journal
3 · Teacherchooses the gameby voice or with a tap
4 · Companionassembles the lesson: slides, instructions for the teacher, handoutsfor this class

How it is built

Each class has a journal kept along the textbook: what was done, what worked, what was hard. The next lesson starts from where the last one ended. A note after the lesson is optional.

The suggestions come from a method base: approaches, lesson stages and task types, each with an explanation and a source. It is kept in plain text files that can be read and added to.

On the teacher's side there is a character on a screen, in a phone or a tablet. It listens, and the camera shows it the textbook page.

A phone screen with a round teal character with two eyes, and two choices below it: role-play as in the textbook, or the game Hide the treasure.
As designed: the character and one fork. Role-play as in the textbook, or a game.

What exists and what does not

Memory between conversations already works: my desk robot at home talks and remembers what was said to it. There is a first version of the method base for English lessons. The companion app itself does not exist yet. The first pilot is planned with English teachers.

Devlog

form

The companion lives on a screen, as a character in a phone or a tablet. The desk robot stays my home robot.

focus

The project took its present form: a companion that prepares lessons with the teacher and remembers each class.

experiment

Tried another form: an assistant that listens to a lesson and counts how the teacher runs it. On my own recordings I wait less than a second after a question.

start

Started as an assistant for the hours before a lesson, in a small robot on the desk.