Ongoing advancements in Generative AI (GenAI) have boosted the potential of applying long-standing "learning-by-teaching" practices in the form of a teachable agent (TA). Despite the recognized roles and opportunities of TAs, less is known about how GenAI could create synergy or introduce challenges in TAs and how students perceived the application of GenAI in TAs. This study explored middle school students' perceived roles, benefits, and challenges of GenAI-powered TAs in an authentic mathematics classroom. Through classroom observation, focus-group interviews, and open-ended surveys of 108 sixth-grade students, we found that students expected the GenAI-powered TA to serve as a learning companion, facilitator, and collaborative problem-solver. Students also expressed the benefits and challenges of GenAI-powered TAs. This study provides implications for the design of educational AI and AI-assisted instruction.

The mental health assessment of middle school students has always been one of the focuses in the field of education. This paper introduces a new ensemble learning network based on BERT, employing the concept of enhancing model performance by integrating multiple classifiers. We trained a range of BERT-based learners, which combined using the majority voting method. We collect social network text data of middle school students through China's Weibo and apply the method to the task of classifying emotional tendencies in middle school students' social network texts. Experimental results suggest that the ensemble learning network has a better performance than the base model and the performance of the ensemble learning model, consisting of three single-layer BERT models, is barely the same as a three-layer BERT model but requires 11.58% more training time. Therefore, in terms of balancing prediction effect and efficiency, the deeper BERT network should be preferred for training. However, for interpretability, network ensembles can provide acceptable solutions.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District says the laws are still catching up with the technology. Multiple Los Angeles-area school districts have investigated instances of "inappropriate," artificial intelligence-generated images of students circulating online and in text messages in recent months. Most recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it is investigating "allegations of inappropriate photos being created and disseminated within the Fairfax High School community," the school district told Fox News Digital in a statement. "These allegations are taken seriously, do not reflect the values of the Los Angeles Unified community and will result in appropriate disciplinary action if warranted." A preliminary investigation revealed that the images were allegedly "created and shared on a third-party messaging app unaffiliated with" LAUSD.

Maria Viego and Cooper Glynn were thriving at their elementary schools. Maria, 10, adored the special certificates she earned volunteering to read to second-graders. Cooper, 9, loved being with his friends and how his teacher incorporated the video game Minecraft into lessons. But when their campuses shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic, their experiences diverged dramatically. Maria is a student in the Coachella Valley Unified School District, where 90% of the children are from low-income families. She didn't have a computer, so she and her mother tried using a cellphone to access her online class, but the connection kept dropping, and they gave up after a week. She did worksheets until June, when she at last received a computer, but struggled to understand the work. Now, as school starts again online, she has told her mother she's frustrated and worried.

Observations of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe (May 8, 1945) included remembrances of such searing events as the struggle on Omaha Beach on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and at least some recognition of the enormous contribution made by the Russian people to the defeat of Fascism. Yet in all this, I suspect the role of the first "high-performance computing" capabilities of the Allies--known as Ultra in Britain, Magic in the U.S.--will receive too little attention. The truth of the matter is that the ability to hack into Axis communications made possible many Allied successes in the field, at sea, and in the air. Alan Turing and other "boffins" at Britain's Bletchley Park facility built the machine--a much-improved version of a prototype developed by the Poles in the interwar period--that had sufficient computing power to break the German Enigma encoding system developed by Arthur Scherbius. The Enigma machine was a typewriter-like device with three rotors, each with an alphabet of its own, so each keystroke could create 17,576 possible meanings (26 x 26 x 26).

Artificial intelligence--code that learns--is likely to be humankind's most important invention. It's a 60-year-old idea that took off five years ago when fast chips enabled massive computing and sensors, cameras, and robots fed data-hungry algorithms. We're a couple of years into a new age where machine learning (a functional subset of AI), big data and enabling technologies are transforming every sector. In every sector, there is a big data set behind every question. Every field is computational: healthcare, manufacturing, law, finance and accounting, retail, and real estate.

Artificial intelligence--code that learns--is likely to be humankind's most important invention. It's a 60-year-old idea that took off five years ago when fast chips enabled massive computing and sensors, cameras, and robots fed data-hungry algorithms. We're a couple of years into a new age where machine learning (a functional subset of AI), big data and enabling technologies are transforming every sector. In every sector, there is a big data set behind every question. Every field is computational: healthcare, manufacturing, law, finance and accounting, retail, and real estate.

Udemy, the largest online learning source, just published its Udemy for Business 2020 Workplace Learning Trends Report: The Skills of the Future (48 pp., PDF, opt-in). As Forbes noticed, the report claims that it is now key "to prepare workforces for the future of work in an AI-enabled world." The report states that "In the world of finance, investment funds managed by AI and computers account for 35% of America's stock market today," citing a recent article in The Economist, The rise of the financial machines. For their part, in the report, Udemy notes that AI is reshaping the world of work. The organization notes that 65% of the leaders cited that AI and robotics are an important or very important issue in human capital.

Students took part in discussions and creative activities, such as designing robot companions and deploying machine–learning to solve problems.

Two new studies from MIT suggest that mindfulness -- the practice of focusing one's awareness on the present moment -- can enhance academic performance and mental health in middle schoolers. The researchers found that more mindfulness correlates with better academic performance, fewer suspensions from school, and less stress. "By definition, mindfulness is the ability to focus attention on the present moment, as opposed to being distracted by external things or internal thoughts. If you're focused on the teacher in front of you, or the homework in front of you, that should be good for learning," says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The researchers also showed, for the first time, that mindfulness training can alter brain activity in students.