Overview:
A veteran math teacher explains how using the AI tool Magic School has helped her make math instruction more engaging and relevant by personalizing content around students' interests and real-world applications, ultimately sparking deeper learning and collaboration in the classroom.
As a classroom teacher of 35 years, I find myself challenged to create relevance with the subject matter in my math classroom in our ever-changing world. The topics of today’s youth and the scenarios they are going to encounter in the “real world” are foreign and seem somewhat out of reach to me. As Kristen Moore writes, “Helping high school students understand that math has useful applications in their lives can boost their engagement in learning.”(Moore, 2022) To spark interest that leads to innovative problem-solving and engage students in conversations, they need to relate to the topic.
“Helping high school students understand that math has useful applications in their lives can boost their engagement in learning.”
Kristen moore, 2022
I have fully embraced the Building Thinking Classrooms model by Peter Liljedahl in my math classrooms. It has been invigorating to see the students working in groups to investigate higher-level mathematical concepts through collaboration and cooperation. Liljedahl was “sparked by observing teachers struggle to implement rich mathematics tasks to engage students in deep thinking.” Although this may seem like a daunting task and very time-consuming, the use of AI and Magic School has made it an accessible goal for all teachers within a manageable timeframe.
Magic School: A.I. Platform
To help me create exciting scenarios and topics around a specific mathematical process, I have become heavily reliant on Magic School. Magic School is an amazing A.I. platform designed to assist teachers with a number of tasks we encounter in our daily jobs. Although I have used it to assist me with writing emails to parents and differentiating instruction, the platform has provided me with the means to strengthen my curriculum by adding relevancy and authenticity.
In my Calculus classroom, I used Magic School to create a breakout room where students interact with the curriculum to solve problems that are of interest to them. The gamification of the breakout room adds intrigue and sparks the competitive nature in the students to collaborate with each other to conquer a common goal. Moving away from my boring lecture on volume of three-dimensional solids, I introduced a scenario created by Magic School: “High School Calculus Students trapped inside a futuristic laboratory located within a massive underground reservoir. The only way to escape is to use their knowledge of integration to determine the volumes of various 3D structures and unlock the doors to freedom.”
Real World Application
Magic School provided the framework for me, as the teacher, to input details specific to my class and the scenario in which I wanted to embed the material. It generated realistic, current problems for the students to solve. As many of my students have aspirations to become engineers, I combined the use of AI applications, such as “Math Story Problem” and “Real World Connections,” to develop multifaceted word problems that demonstrate an environment in which engineers work. The tasks that they may encounter while working on an engineering team in their future career provide the relevance and authenticity they desire.
To further enhance the problem-solving environment and set the stage for a realistic work environment, I used the Magic School Image Generator to immerse students in their learning environment. By seeing themselves in the scenario, the experience becomes more relevant and authentic.
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Student Engagement
Another aspect of Magic School I have used to engage students in topics of interest to them is the Lesson Hook application.
In my Introduction to Statistics class, I find myself using Magic School on a daily basis. I take the learning target for the day and enter it into AI. I observed that several of my students were wearing jerseys from our professional basketball team, the Timberwolves, as they were making a run into the playoffs. I entered this information with the learning target pertaining to mean, median, and mode into Magic School, and it provided me with 8 different data sets pertaining to the Timberwolves so that each group could work together independently to strengthen their skills around relevant data that was of interest to them.
The Magic School Application of Real World Connections connected my learning target related to the empirical rule in statistics to data related to understanding car performance, car safety ratings, and predicting maintenance needs. Each student used the platform I provided in context of the empirical rule to investigate their dream car and determine how its data compared to that presented in class.
Implementation
The Make it Relevant! The Magic School application offers you the opportunity to specify your learning target and describe your students, including any unique characteristics and interests. It creates relevant, thought-provoking questions that can be used as a teaching tool, homework or test question, or be the launching pad for further discovery in cooperative groups. When studying Observational Studies vs Experiments, I had each group provide me with a topic of interest to them, and tailored the learning around their particular interests. Magic School provided me with scenarios pertaining to music, social media, and sports. Creating personalized learning that aligns with students’ interests helps make the curriculum come alive for them.
The implementation of Magic School into my lessons has invigorated my teaching and sparked genuine interest in the curriculum in my students. Circling back to Kristin Moore’s Article, How to Make Math Concepts Feel Relevant to Students, Moore states, “The innermost circle of relevance is that in which the students find personal connections to the mathematics they are studying.” It is a time-saving AI Application that is user-friendly and can be used in a variety of ways to enhance any subject matter. Magic School has provided me with the mechanism to make my curriculum current, relevant, and connected to the topics of interest to my students.
by Michelle Grunewald
References:
Grunewald, Michelle. (2024) Break Out Room for Formative Assessment, Google Forms.https://forms.gle/7F64bQ68S8Xstkjk6
Open AI. (2025) Magic School https://app.magicschool.ai/tools
Liljedahl, Peter. (2020, October 3) Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. Corwin Mathematics Series. Sage Publications.
Moore, Kristen (2022, March 3) How to Make Math Concepts Feel Relevant to Students. Edutopia,https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-make-math-concepts-feel-relevant-students
Wilkerson, Trena (2021, October) Mathematics with Rigor, Relevance, and Responsiveness. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, https://www.nctm.org/News-and-Calendar/Messages-from-the-President/Archive/Trena-Wilkerson/Mathematics–with-Rigor,-Relevance,-and-Responsiveness
