Welcome to the Socratic AI project, an innovative initiative aimed at enhancing education in Computer Science with the power of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the remarkable ability to swiftly provide answers to questions. However, when applied in teaching and learning (T&L) contexts, this immediacy can hinder critical thinking—the very process that leads students to deeper understanding. Inspired by the Socratic method of questioning, our research project aims to enhance T&L by developing an AI system that offers hints but not answers. By guiding students through the thought process required to arrive at solutions, we foster independent learning and cognitive engagement. We explore combinatorial search algorithms, measures of semantic similarity, and leverage existing large language models (LLMs) to build a Socratic AI that balances the relevance of hints and the leakage of solution. Interactive teaching materials will be created in the form of Jupyter notebooks, and deployed in an elastic and scalable system using Wasm, WebGPU and GPU-enabled Kubernetes clusters.
We have started to incorporate Socratic AI into CS1302 Introduction to Computer Programming course offer in 2024/25 Semester A:
This project is supported by the Huawei Gift Fund and the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong. Their contribution has been invaluable to the development and success of the Socratic AI project.