🤔 Does ChatGPT Know its Times Tables?

📚 Knowledge builders

• Reasoning Models → Reasoning models are a type of AI that are designed to solve complex problems by breaking them down into smaller, manageable steps. Unlike general AI models that give direct answers, reasoning models show their thought process, including steps like thinking through different solutions, testing them, and picking the best one.

• LLM and X tables → Yuntian Deng (@yuntiandeng) has been asking each ChatGPT model how well it is knows its timetables. The results are quite staggering. One of the latest models, while it performs better than previous models, still struggles with accuracy above 13 × 13.

  

  The results of o1 and o3-mini on times tables up to 20 × 20.

🤖 Industry updates

• Claude 3.7 → Anthropic, one of my favourite LLMs because of the Artefact feature, has added reasoning capabilities. It is available on the free tier (though there are limitations) on both the web and the app. While other reasoning LLMs effectively switch to different models, Claude is different in that it uses the same model, but asks it to act differently. You can see a quick video preview below

• Chartered College of Teaching: AI in Education → I will be speaking on a panel at the Chartered College of Teaching AI in Education: Annual Lecture event taking place on March 10th. We will speaking about the positives and potential downsides of AI. there are still some tickets left if you can make it.

✨ Fresh prompts

1. Gap Fill → This prompt was used by Mr Hart (@hartmaths) who wanted a quick gap fill activity around prisms. I think work like this is important in mathematics as you can see pupils around other aspects of the concept rather than just getting answers right. Here is the simple prompt that was used, and I offer some suggestions below as to how it could be improved.

Create a gap fill activity about volume, prisms and volume of prisms.

This demonstrates the usefulness and limitation of AI and why an expert is always needed. Notice that in question 6 it has not provided any blanks, so this would need to be corrected. This just demonstrates that AI is far from perfect, but creating this exercise with AI is undoubtedly quicker than not using AI. Notice how the AI has kept the size of the gap consistent. This is good as the size of the gap can often hint at what the potential answers are.

I would improve this prompt by providing some more context as to who will be completing this and asking it for an answer key too.

Create a gap fill activity about volume, prisms and volume of prisms for Year 8 students (ages 12-13) at the fictional Greenwood Academy. The activity should assess students’ understanding of key concepts related to volume, different types of prisms, and the formula for calculating the volume of a prism.

The worksheet must contain the following features:
A set of 10 gap-fill sentences where students must complete missing words or numbers.
The words that would fit into the blanks at the top of the worksheet
An answer key for teachers.
The worksheet should be in clear, student-friendly language suitable for KS3.
The questions should be in an order from the simplest to the more complex, but not ask students to solve any multiplication problems.

Greenwood Academy is a secondary school in England, following the KS3 curriculum.
Year 8 students have recently covered area and perimeter and are now learning volume and 3D shapes.

See output here.