Should You Use AI Dynamic Simulations Instead of Standard Learning Videos? A Classroom Teacher’s Experience
Last Wednesday, I pulled my small 4th grade math group to the back table — the one with the chipped edge that’s held 12 years of half-erased fraction problems — and pulled up the new tool I’d gotten an email about over the weekend. Usually, I start our fraction equivalence unit with a 5-minute standard YouTube video that walks through partitioning pizzas, the same one I’ve used for three years. It’s reliable, it aligns with our standards, and the host is perky without being annoying. This time, I pulled up a dynamic simulation instead.
Javi, my student who still zones out and doodles monsters on his worksheet any time we play a pre-recorded video, immediately leaned forward. “Wait, what’s this?” Instead of a fixed sequence of cuts to a fixed pizza, the simulation let him drag lines to make his own cuts, change the food from pizza to anything he typed, and adjust the number of portions any time he wanted. He typed “chocolate birthday cake” and suddenly the pizza was a sprinkled cake, then he cut it into 10 slices. “That’s how many kids are on my soccer team,” he said, before I could even prompt him. “If we have two extra players at our game Saturday, do I have to cut every slice in half to share?”
That’s the question that stopped me. He’d never asked a spontaneous question about fractions after watching the standard pizza video. That entire unit, he’d just nodded along and then gotten every problem wrong.
I’ve been testing this tool for the past three weeks, both with my class and my own 10-year-old son Leo, who has dyscalculia and has spent months fighting me over fraction homework. Most nights, we’d sit at the kitchen island with a half-eaten granola bar next to his notebook, and he’d watch a standard learning video, then stare at his worksheet like the numbers were written in another language. He’d tell me “the numbers don’t move, they just sit there and I can’t see how they fit.” The first night we tried the simulation, he immediately pulled up a tray of 20 chocolate chip cookies, gave 5 to our dog, 5 to me, 5 to his dad, and kept 5. He stared at the screen for 10 seconds, then said “Wait. That’s four groups. So my five is one out of four, same as one slice of the four-slice pizza. Those are the same?” That’s the ah-ha moment we’d been chasing for two months, and it happened because he built the example himself, not because someone walked him through it on a pre-made video.
Standard learning videos are easy. You click play, you set it and forget it for five minutes, you move on. They’re great for introducing a basic concept to a whole group, or for giving kids a recap to do at home when you don’t have time to re-explain. But what I’ve noticed over the years is that only about half my class actually retains anything from them. The kids who struggle with attention or working memory zone out halfway through, because it’s all passive. There’s nothing for them to do, no choice in how the example looks, no room for their own life to seep into the problem.
That doesn’t mean the simulations are perfect. Last week, I let my whole class try it during a math rotation, and one kid spent 12 minutes changing the color of his cake and cutting it into 127 slices instead of working on his fraction task. Another kid got frustrated when the tool messed up his cuts, making one slice three times bigger than the rest, and shut his laptop and refused to try again. It also takes more time. A standard video fits neatly into a 5-minute gap in your lesson plan, or a 5-minute break before homework when you’re rushing to get to soccer practice. The simulation can easily eat 15 minutes, which means I have to shift other activities around, and as a parent, some nights I just don’t have that extra time.
I’ve worked out a few small routines that make it work, though, that any parent or teacher can try. First, I don’t throw out standard videos. I still start every new unit with a short, standard video to lay out the basic rule, so everyone has a starting point. Then I use the simulation for 10 minutes of small group work with the kids who aren’t getting it, instead of whole group. For parents doing homework, the routine I share with other parents is this: if your kid watches a learning video and still can’t explain the concept afterward, pull up the simulation for 5 minutes after, and let them play first. I give Leo a clear rule: 3 minutes to mess around and change whatever you want, then we do one problem together. That gives him the engagement he needs without turning homework into a 45-minute detour. I also keep the old standard video bookmarked for days when the internet is spotty, the tool glitches, or we’re just running late. It’s not an either/or thing, it’s a both/and.
I’ve only been doing this for three weeks, so I don’t have any big data to share about test scores or long-term retention. Some days it goes great, some days it’s a messy distraction that cuts into our reading time. Last week, we had a fire drill right in the middle of Javi’s soccer birthday cake, and we lost all his work when the Wi-Fi cut out, and he was grumpy about it for the rest of math period.
Last night, Leo brought home a quiz with an equivalent fraction problem he got right, the first one he’s gotten right on his own all semester. He told me “I just pictured my cookies, so I knew it was 1/4.” I still reach for the standard video when we’re in a hurry, but these days, most of the time I open the simulation first. It’s not for every kid, not every lesson, not every rushed Tuesday evening before practice. But for the kids who can’t see the math in a static picture or a pre-planned video, a little extra mess is worth it. I’m still figuring out what works, and that’s okay.
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