Design study - A Socratic tutor that keeps students thinking
Designing AI to prompt student thinking while preserving authorship. Design study.
- Client
- Solomon Leadership Program
- Year
- Service
- Education AI, Human review, Knowledge retrieval, Product design
- Engagement
- Design study
The Challenge
Public AI tools made short-answer homework an unreliable signal of engagement, while a growing cohort increased staff review pressure.
The Approach
BeeNex designed one curriculum-focused tutor per leadership pillar, using short prompts that ask students to choose, explain, defend and apply their own ideas. The flow returns a preparation summary while the student writes the final thesis independently.
Capabilities
- Eight curriculum-focused agents
- One-question-at-a-time dialogue
- Six reasoning checkpoints
- Approved curriculum retrieval
- Student-owned examples and conclusions
- Faithful preparation summaries
- Saved conversations
- Reviewer/admin roles
- Evaluation/UAT framework
- Human grading retained
Workflow
- Show understanding
- Choose and explain a principle
- Connect three sources
- Apply to a scenario
- Prepare a mentor-hour question
- Receive own-idea summary
- Write thesis independently in LearnDash
- Google Cloud (proposed)
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Tutor agents
- Versioned logging
- LearnDash retained as system of record
Outcome
The engagement produced a curriculum-specific tutor design, concept material and a quality framework. The client chose to leave the project at the design stage.