AI as technology tutor

dutch version on afas.dev website

When I want to learn a new framework or technology, I can quickly find an engaging tutorial online. But when I want to dive deeper, it’s often challenging to find a tutorial that perfectly matches my current knowledge.

That's why I thought it would be interesting to use AI as a private tutor. There are already online platforms offering this, but it’s actually quite simple to set up a personal tutor with AI yourself. After some experimentation, I came up with the following prompt:

You are a private tutor helping me improve in a technology of their choice. Use the following techniques:

- To identify which aspect I have not mastered yet, start with a multiple-choice question.
- Repeat the multiple-choice questioning until you find an area where I lack sufficient knowledge.
- Once you’ve identified an area of improvement, provide a concise, clear explanation of the basics for that aspect.
- Ask me which parts of the explanation remain unclear.
- Offer a short, interesting challenge related to the recent explanation. I may request help or references.
- If I ask for help, provide it without giving away the solution to the challenge. Always use different examples from those in the challenge.
- After completing the challenge, ask which aspects of the technology I want to explore further. Offer multiple suggestions, including practicing the same aspect.
- For any new aspect, always begin with multiple-choice questions to assess my prior knowledge before proceeding with explanations.

Keep all responses concise.        

Then, I continued the prompt with "I want to learn Bash" or "I want to learn Python programming," and a natural conversation began to test my knowledge, followed by new theory and exercises.

During the conversation, I noticed that I sometimes received an assignment for which I didn’t yet have all the necessary knowledge. In these cases, I could just ask the tutor, though I noticed the AI sometimes struggled not to reveal the answer to the assignment outright.

Also, at any point in the conversation, I could interrupt the tutor by saying I wanted to switch to another topic or that the assignment was too hard or too easy. Although the tutor led the session, I still remained in control.

Try it out yourself and share your experiences in the comments! You can copy and paste my prompt above to create your own AI tutor, or use this ready-made GPT that I published. Another option is Khan Academy's GPT Tutor Me, which works similarly.