The future of practice: Enabling teachers to create learning interactives with generative UI

Digital educational tools have transformed how students around the world access information, from online textbooks to video libraries. Yet, for all the remarkable leaps in technology and accessibility, digital learning can often feel like a passive experience. Interactive, engaging, multimodal forms of practice that can encourage students to think for themselves and work through solutions have great potential for learning but remain largely out of reach. They are expensive to create, limited in number, and often require a lot more effort from the teacher. We wanted to see if AI could help close this gap.

Today, we’re sharing our latest research which pushes the frontiers of interactive learning. Our new research experiment allows educators to create custom, interactive, and guided educational simulations. These learning interactives are tailored to the teacher’s objectives and curriculum, and are generated dynamically, leveraging a novel application of generative user interfaces (GenUI) that we’ve optimized for learning.

Having received initial positive teacher feedback from a trusted tester pool, we’re also releasing a sample library of over 30 learning interactives in English for STEM subjects including physics, chemistry, biology, and math with a focus on middle and high school. These are all generated by AI and reviewed by teachers. Schools using Google Workspace for Education can sign up to provide feedback to improve learning interactives through the Google for Education Pilot Program. This pilot is an early step toward developing more learning interactives for public use.

The case for active learning

Adapting generative UI for education

To make this possible, we turned to generative UI, an active area of research whereby AI models dynamically construct user interfaces rather than requiring those interfaces to be coded in advance.

Instructional design

We define generation requirements to include: