Hackaday Prize 2023: The Realities Of The Homework Machine

For those outside the world of education, it can be hard to judge the impact that ChatGPT has had on homework assignments. If you didn’t know, the first challenge of the 2023 Hackaday Prize is focused on improving education. [Devadath P R] decided that the best way to help teachers and teaching culture was to confront them head-on with our new reality by building the homework machine.

The goal of the machine is to be able to stick in any worksheet or assignment and have it write out the answers in your own handwriting, and so far, the results are pretty impressive. There are already pen holder tools for 3D printers, but they often have a few drawbacks. Existing tools often take quite a while to generate G-Code for long pages of text. Hobby servos to lift the pen up and down take more wear than you’d expect as a single page has thousands of actuations. Vibrations are also a problem as they are a dead giveaway that the text was not human-written. [Devadath] created a small Python GUI to record their particular handwriting style on a graphics tablet and used ChatGPT to generate answers. Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2023: The Realities Of The Homework Machine”

Wolfram Alpha Shows Its Work

The bane of math students everywhere is the teacher asking for you to show your work. If you’ve grown up where a computer is a normal part of school work, that might annoy you since a lot of tools just give you an answer. We aren’t suggesting you cheat at homework, but we did notice that Wolfram Alpha now shows more of its work when it solves many common math problems.

Granted, the site has always shown work on some problems. However, a recent update shows more intermediate steps and also covers more kinds of problems in a step-by-step format. There are examples, but be aware that for general use, you do need to upgrade to pro (about $6 a month or less if you are student or teacher).

Continue reading “Wolfram Alpha Shows Its Work”