From AI to ABC's: Texas School Puts a new spin on Learning

This is Alpha School where teachers are considered guides and students study for only two hours a day and supposedly they're learning twice as fast.

You condense like a 6-hour normal school day into only 2 hours and it's not like with a teacher standing in front of you. It's with an AI app that's personalized to skills that you need to learn in the grade level.

Students begin each day with a group activity to build connection and focus. Then for the next two hours, students spend their time on an AI program that custom builds their learning path in real time.

It's a personalized AI-driven experience with one-on-one virtual tutors that adjust instantly to the students' move.

In public school, you very much just teach a blanket lesson and you just hope and you cross your fingers that kids catch on.

Because the AI learning only takes two hours, the rest of the day is open for exploring their passions like swimming, art, or even launching their own startup.

Some dive into music. One student, he's building a cleaning robot.

When I build it, but program it to clean.

You're going to program it to clean stuff.

Yeah. Like tiny stuff.

After lunch, like it's not academics. It's just the workshops, the teamwork, the doing your passion project.

And so for them, I think that's why they take it so seriously because they have that understanding of this isn't a traditional school where I'm going to be doing this for the entire day.

But I know that if I'm going to condense an entire day down into just the morning, then that's what has to get done.

If you get an epic day, if you get nine masteries, well, you don't have to do your computer anymore. You can paint, make stuff.

So, what do you think about your guides here?

They're nice. They don't tell me the answers. They just give me resources.

They light up when they talk about them. Like they just feel like, you know, this is the person who really cares about them and leans into who they are as a person.

Like they just get to know that kid and they try to help motivate them through the things that they love and help guide them.

They never will tell you that you can't do something.

So over time, like then you develop that mindset.

And so just like the environment from day one has always been like you can do anything if you set your mind to it.

So I think that's like where I started to learn motivation.

I spoke to Sarah and who really made a deep impact on me.

I love that. When I walked away I text my son just met a six-year-old who used incentive correctly in a sentence.

My son who just turned 11 says, "What does incentive mean?"

You're going to make me cry.

So that to me to me that to me was like instantly verification that it's working something is working here.

I feel like public schools need to have an open mind and really start leveraging the power of AI and individualized learning models.