AI-Driven Private School

An AI-driven private school, called Alpha School, is opening a Northern Virginia campus this fall, charging up to $65,000 annually. Students will spend two hours daily on academics via adaptive apps like IXL, then focus on life skills and workshops.

Instead of teachers, AI guides oversee learning and activities. Backed by billionaire investors, Alpha is expanding to 12 campuses nationwide while seeking approval to adapt its model in charter schools.

More information:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/08/26/alpha-school-virginia-ai-education/

Generated Video Teaches Robots

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers developed a video generation model to produce demonstration videos to teach robots to perform specific tasks. Users provide a text command and an image of the current scene to produce a demonstration video tailored to the robot's specific task and environment, with no additional training required. RIGVid's success rate across tasks was 85%, outperforming other robot imitation methods.

RIGVid’s approach for extracting an object’s motion from a generated video, based on model-based six DoF object pose tracking, also outperformed alternative methods for trajectory extraction using optical flow and sparse keypoints. The improvement was apparent on challenging tasks, like sweeping dirt or placing a thin spatula into a pan, where the other methods struggled with object occlusion.

More information:

https://siebelschool.illinois.edu/news/RIGVid

AI Changes Education

Artificial intelligence tools are changing the teaching profession as educators use them to help write quizzes and worksheets, design lessons, assist with grading and reduce paperwork. By freeing up their time, many say technology has made them better at their jobs. A poll released Wednesday by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found 6 in 10 U.S. teachers working in K-12 public schools used AI tools for their work over the past school year, with heavier use among high school educators and early-career teachers. It surveyed more than 2,000 teachers nationwide in April.

Respondents who use AI tools weekly estimate they save them about six hours a week, suggesting the technology could help alleviate teacher burnout, said Gallup research consultant Andrea Malek Ash, who authored the report. As schools navigate concerns over student abuse of the technology, some are also introducing guidelines and training for educators so teachers are aware of avoiding shortcuts that shortchange students. About 8 in 10 teachers who use AI tools say it saves them time on work tasks like making worksheets, assessments, quizzes or on administrative work.

More information:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatgpt-teacher-chatbot-b1630bc549e9044d1e3bbcc060fb422c