The educational landscape has been instantly altered with the introduction of highly effective LLMs to the public. The presence of AI chatbots that can instantly answer any question — most of the time very correctly, though occasionally very wrongly — changes the approach to many problems in this world. Educational systems have not yet had sufficient time to respond to this situation in an optimal manner. Some places are embracing the use of AI, while others are outright banning it from use in schools, with valid arguments existing on both sides of the issue. However this debate plays out, AI appears to be an entrenched part of humanity's future development, and so it behooves us to take proactive steps toward defining how that relationship progresses. This is truer in education than most any other field.

At DarkViolet.ai, the team behind learnwithlumi.com, we believe that the greatest advances that we will experience in the coming years will emerge from the close interaction between humans and AI. Education is central to this, both as an application and as a prerequisite for the technological future we are stepping into.

The Irreplaceable Human Teacher

Let us first of all acknowledge the importance of the human teacher in the process of education. This human connection cannot, and should not be replaced. The teacher's ability to impact the lives and learning of students should merely be augmented with AI. With this aim in mind, there are substantial improvements that can be offered to teachers through the use of AI, improvements that above all else help the teacher in their primary aim of helping students learn. By removing administrative burdens while providing added insight into their students' education, teachers will find themselves doing more of what they became a teacher for.

Current Educational System Challenges

Current systems are dominated by a process that involves teaching the exact same material to a group of students, and measuring the performance of each member in this group, both relatively and absolutely, using uniform examination methods. Students then get a grade, and either pass and move on, or fail and start over. These grades carry progressively more weight in the later years of primary schooling, and are key determining factors of future education outcomes and even early professional outcomes for students.

That is the current system that is in place, and it has long been established that this entire system can be gamed, and is gamed, by the students at the expense of learning. From the student perspective, learning is irrelevant if there is a sequence of actions and behaviors that can be carried out that result in a high grade with or without a sustainable understanding of the subject. We can offer up platitudes all day long about the importance of learning, but the student can see the reality. Nobody cares if they know a subject. What matters is getting past a subject with the highest possible marks. This system is only tolerable because of the historical economics of the education process.

The Economic Shift in Education

In modern society, we have always only been able to spare one adult for every ~30 children who need educating. Some places are a 1/3 that and some places are 3x that, but globally we are in this general ballpark. Due to AI these economics are being turned upside down, in terms of how much that one adult can accomplish with each individual student through the use of AI. It is incumbent upon current generations to recognize that this is a moment of profound change, where new patterns of teaching children can be rapidly developed with profound societal and individual benefit.

The Need for Proactive Experimentation

In our journeys and discussions with many educators and leaders, there is a profound willingness to cautiously embrace these changes with a spirit of experimentation. We can design experiments where there is zero risk, where the worst case scenario is that the students continue to perform at the status quo, but with the best case being a more engaging educational experience that leads to deeper learning. We should be willing to take such steps, to give education a chance to be adaptable to the needs of the future. Being proactive during this time means taking the opportunity to both experiment and to trail blaze in order to find the optimal path. Failing to be proactive means being forced into making decisions once critical points have been passed. Knee-jerk reactions like banning all AI are harmful, as are school systems falling for snake-oil salesmen promising to "detect" uses of AI cheating by their students.

But there is an even bigger danger in that administrative types will see this an opportunity to trim costs and reduce the teacher to student ratio even further than ever before. The only way to prevent this is to re-imagine what is possible with education, and deliver results before the bureaucrats start finding ways to "improve efficiency" by means of halving the teaching workforce or worse.

Introducing Learn With Lumi

We are developing a better way, as there must surely be a better, more intelligent method that can be found with the help of vast amounts of intelligence currently available at our fingertips. We are taking steps towards this goal by developing our own education system Learn With Lumi. This is an ambitious effort, but one worth pursuing. In this time of uncertainty in our educational support systems, we are passionate about helping people gain broader access to superior education, regardless of circumstance. It is also a time where the right effort in the right direction can pay great dividends. Careful thought about how to integrate AI into the curriculum can lead to it bringing a net benefit to each and every participant in the education system.

Learn With Lumi Public Beta Launch

Our public beta of learnwithlumi.com is officially live on Pi day, 2025 (3.14.2025). This ambitious release emerged from our experience as homeschool parents. After using a similar system, the alpha version, for the last school year with great success, we chose to build the Learn with Lumi teaching platform. We focused on the most vital features that are necessary for running a small school, and then we introduced a number of AI features that are in line with the above aims.

Features of Learn With Lumi

• School Creation You get to create your own school, choose the courses you will teach, and then add your students.
• Self-Learning You can always teach the course to yourself as well.
• Diverse Activities Each course comes with many different activities that can be used for independent work by the student or used as classroom based work that is shared by all.
• Extensible Design The app is designed to be highly extensible, with new types of activities being continuously developed.

Current Activity Types Available

• Multiple Choice Traditional multiple choice questions with automated grading.
• Short Answer Brief responses that can be quickly assessed with AI.
• Fill-in-the-Blank Test knowledge by completing sentences or concepts.
• True-False Simple binary options for fact-checking understanding.
• Essay Longer form writing with AI-enabled feedback and assessment.
• Flashcard Memory-based learning tools for key concepts.
• AI-Enabled Discussion Provides for deeper exploration into given topics or discussions.

All of these activities have fully automated grading, with feedback generated for both the student and the teacher. In the future, we will have a steady stream of new types of activities that are built upon the same framework and offer new ways of engaging with the learning material. For instance, here is an example of the soon to be released timeline activity.

For this activity, students have to place items from their lessons on a timeline. We were able to generate this entire type of activity within our AI based development system (we use cursor with Claude sonnet 3.7) in a couple of hours. Now, any time we have a lesson that has a time sequence associated with it, we can ask Lumi to generate the data for one of these timeline activities. And then we have a brand new activity, with interactivity and automated grading already built in. All of this is done in less time than it would take a teacher to grade a classroom full of assignments in a conventional setting.

Join the Educational Evolution

We are just getting started, and we truly hope to reach out to educators everywhere to get feedback on our public beta. I will be writing a series of posts that will discuss more about the vision for the full release that we expect to have ready before the next school year. We rely on the feedback and adoption from our beta users to make learnwithlumi.com a success, and so we encourage all to try it out and tell us what you think.

Now, more than ever, we have a great opportunity to bring real advancement to education, and we have never needed it more. Please join the evolution of education at learnwithlumi.com.