SAMR and AI: Don’t get stuck on substitution

At Flint, we’re solely focused on building AI tools to transform education. But that wasn’t always the case. At first, we actually started with substitution.

The first version of Flint was an AI copilot for teachers — a tool that any K-12 teacher could use to create classroom activities, worksheets, or lesson plans. Here’s what our original website looked like:

This was the idea that Jinseo and I launched Flint with, and we built a world-class AI copilot that was used by over 500 teachers.

After a month, however, we shifted gears. While it was great to use AI to save teachers time, we found that often the most passionate and driven teachers prefer to manually create materials for students, and AI could be seen as detracting from their craft.

More importantly, we realized that the product we had built wasn’t directly improving the learning experience for students. AI today can at most mimic the work that humans produce when it comes to worksheets and classroom materials, meaning that the quality of learning for students would at best be the same as before.

We had the nagging feeling that there was potential in using AI for personalized learning, which would be truly transformative if it worked. So we set out to explore.

Very quickly, we saw firsthand that schools were ripe for transformation, and that AI today can support transformation via personalized learning. We found that many longstanding challenges in education, such as Bloom’s 2 sigma problem, could now be addressed. Generative AI finally makes it possible to personalize learning and assessment for students in subjects ranging from Spanish to Computer Science.

Additionally, we found that there’s an innate ambition in teachers to innovate practices to help students learn better. Many educators are specifically curious about using AI to transform teaching and learning, but lack the tools to do it because most tools today are built for substitution.

So, we went for transformation. We built Flint into the best way for teachers to use AI to personalize learning for students, and the use cases we’ve seen have blown us away. Here’s Justin Cerenzia, Chair of Teaching and Learning at The Episcopal Academy, summarizing his experience with rolling Flint out at the school:

"The feedback from our community about Flint has been overwhelmingly positive. What has stood out the most, echoed by both teachers and students, is how Flint encourages a different mode of thinking. It's not about rote memorization or simply getting through an assignment; Flint has an uncanny ability to compel individuals to engage with material on a cognitive level that's often missing from more traditional assignment types. It's one thing to introduce a new tool that people like, but it's another to introduce one that prompts new ways of thinking and adds meaningful value to the educational process."

"This isn't just another tool designed to automate tasks; it's a resource that amplifies the craft of teaching while simultaneously enriching the learning experience. Flint is more than just a tool—it's a partner in the classroom that aids in facilitating valuable retrieval practice through immediate feedback. In doing so, Flint doesn't just make our lives easier; it makes us more effective educators and helps students learn more effectively."