One wild trick to help your kids with math
I spent 8 years painstakingly hand crafting math problems for my kids. Then I built an AI that makes better worksheets, study guides and answer keys than I ever could.
For eight years, when my kids needed extra practice before a math test, I sat down and handwrote practice problems myself. Sounds wholesome. It was mostly tedious.
Something you might not know about handcrafting math problems: you have to solve them (in your head) as you write them. Because if you don’t, you end up with division that produces some wretched 11-decimal answer, or a quadratic that has no real solutions, and your kid is sitting there staring at it while you quietly panic and say “let me check that one.” Teachers really aren’t paid enough.
The process I used was: come up with a good problem, pre-solve it, write the answer somewhere, repeat. Then when they come back with their work, solve it again alongside them to help them check. For basic arithmetic, totally manageable. For my freshman in Algebra 2 or my seventh grader in Pre-Algebra? That 10-minute process quickly grew to 45-minutes or more. My daughter once solved problems faster than I could write them. That was a humbling evening.
I started trying to use AI for this maybe three years ago. The results were... fine. Inconsistent. The formatting was always a mess and I’d have to clean it up before printing. And the problems weren’t always right. Or leveled correctly. Or just plain repetitive.
Over the last year it got noticeably better. I started testing models by asking them to generate LaTeX directly. Real formatted worksheets became easily printable PDFs. Over time, its gotten more reliable. But I was still doing a lot of shepherding: prompt, review, fix the formatting, regenerate problems that didn’t make sense, spot-check the answers. Better, but still bad.
Something has shifted in the last few weeks. Gemini 3.1 Pro and Opus 4.6 are incredible for this use case. The results have gotten... good?
A while ago, I realized I could take a photo of my kid’s existing problems (problems their teacher assigned, or problems they’d already worked through) and say: make me more like these. And a thinking model would just run off and make good practice problems. Not just structurally similar, but calibrated to exactly the right difficulty level, because it had actual examples to learn from.
I think this might actually work now! Thank you thinking models!
