S'more Info Session — Teaching Math with Flint

00:00 Introduction

Teddy Lane welcomes attendees and introduces the session on teaching math with Flint, inviting participants to share where they are joining from, what grade levels they teach, and what they are currently working on in their math classrooms.

The session is framed around exploring all the ways Flint can help math teachers leverage AI tools to amplify student voices, discussion, and mathematical thinking. Teddy previews the agenda: two guest teachers will share how they are already using Flint in their math classrooms, followed by demonstrations of additional use cases and a Q&A session.

Teddy introduces the guest speakers — Mark Strawn, the upper division math teacher at Cassidy School, and Leah Teasman, the learning specialist at Atlanta International School — and explains that they will each demonstrate different approaches to using Flint for math instruction.

03:11 Mark Strawn: AI-graded handwritten homework

Mark Strawn shares how he built a reusable Flint activity template that allows students to scan handwritten homework with their phones and receive automated grading from Sparky, solving the problem of homework completion checks that provide no meaningful feedback.

He explains his design goals: minimal extra time for the teacher, accurate scoring, quick assessment of student progress, and ensuring students make genuine attempts at the work. For students, the workflow preserves pencil-and-paper problem solving while adding nearly immediate feedback.

Mark walks through the teacher setup process: creating a typed answer key that includes original problems, graphics, and word problems, then handwriting the solutions for every problem. He demonstrates how he verifies the answer key with Sparky to ensure accuracy before using his reusable template.

The student workflow is straightforward: write their name, include the original problem number and statement, scan all pages into a single PDF using Google Drive, upload the PDF into the Flint activity, and press start. Sparky then grades every problem against the answer key.

Mark demonstrates the results view, showing how teachers get a quick overview of how many problems were attempted, which ones were correct, and which need attention. He highlights specific examples where the grading caught subtle errors in student work, such as using discrete values instead of describing an infinite set, allowing him to focus his feedback on the most important conceptual gaps.

He notes that the template took significant initial investment to develop but now requires almost no additional effort per assignment — the only variable is uploading a new answer key each time.

13:57 Q&A on homework template

Teddy shares that Mark's homework grading template is available on the Flint Public Library, searchable by "math homework template" or by Mark Strawn's name as the creator. Teachers can duplicate it into their own Flint school and upload their own answer keys.

Mark advises keeping the answer key separate from the template stored in the school library, attaching it only after duplicating the template for a specific assignment, so the master template stays clean and reusable.

15:33 Leah Teasman: Bridge tests and adaptive study guides

Leah Teasman introduces her context as a learning specialist — not a math teacher — working with two different algebra classes at Atlanta International School. Her Algebra 1 class consists of students who either did not pass the previous year or transferred in without the credit, while her Algebra 2 class includes students with learning differences whom she co-teaches with a math teacher.

For Algebra 1, Leah explains how she built a diagnostic bridge test in Flint to assess how much pre-algebra students remembered before beginning new material. Because her students are semi-professional football players with irregular schedules, the test needed to be flexible enough to complete in short increments while preventing students from seeing future questions during breaks.

Flint auto-graded the bridge test and provided detailed feedback that Leah used as a reflection tool with students, discussing whether they agreed with the assessment and identifying areas for follow-up instruction.

For Algebra 2, Leah created a self-paced study guide where students interacted with Sparky to practice and receive encouragement. Students who felt uncertain could ask for additional examples before moving on, while more confident students progressed at their own pace. She configured Sparky to be encouraging, to ask for student work, and to explain why answers were incorrect.

Leah highlights that Sparky's positivity helped build confidence among students who might otherwise be reluctant to ask questions in front of peers, and that the real-time notifications helped her identify struggling students between class sessions.

23:01 Discussion on student confidence and math anxiety

Teddy and Leah discuss how Flint helps address math anxiety and student confidence. Leah notes that students who would not ask questions in front of classmates will ask Sparky on their personal computer, and that the encouraging feedback helps build confidence in a subject that often erodes it.

The conversation explores warm calling strategies, where teachers can use Sparky interactions to prepare students before asking them to share with the class, reducing the pressure of cold calling while still encouraging classroom discussion.

25:18 Adaptive practice and pre-assessment demo

Teddy demonstrates an adaptive practice activity for factoring quadratic equations, available on the Flint Public Library. The activity adjusts difficulty based on student performance — some students receive problems with rational or whole-number roots while more advanced students encounter quadratics with one or zero roots.

He shows the student experience, where Sparky presents problems, provides up to two hints per problem, and gives immediate feedback. Walking through completed student sessions, Teddy demonstrates how teachers can review both the digital work and uploaded handwritten work, with Sparky flagging inconsistencies between the two.

Teddy then transitions to interactive tools, demonstrating an arithmetic versus geometric sequences exploration he built in approximately 15 minutes using Flint's interactive artifact builder. Students click through visual patterns and receive feedback as they develop ideas about the differences between arithmetic and geometric growth, providing a discovery-based lesson hook.

He walks through the build process, showing how he uploaded a static image he previously used in his classroom and asked Sparky to create an interactive version, then iterated through several rounds of refinement — removing labels so students could arrive at their own conclusions, adjusting the visual design, and using screenshots to communicate desired changes.

40:58 Creating follow-up activities from analytics

Mark asks how to quickly generate practice problems based on areas where students struggled on a homework assignment. Teddy demonstrates the Create Follow-up Activity button within Flint's analytics, which uses the identified areas of improvement to automatically generate a new activity targeting those weaknesses.

For generating a summary document of class-wide struggles, Teddy shows how teachers can use the analytics chat to ask Sparky to analyze student performance across an activity and produce a document with targeted practice problems based on common areas of difficulty.

46:58 Generating practice problems from student struggles

Mark clarifies that he wants Sparky to create brand-new problems based on the specific areas where students struggled, not just a summary. Teddy confirms this is possible through the analytics chat and demonstrates how Sparky can access previously created documents and analytics data to generate fresh practice materials.

Teddy also addresses a question about grading adaptive activities, explaining that rubrics for adaptive assessments should focus on general skills rather than specific answers, since each student receives different problems. He shows where analysis guidelines live in the activity builder and how Sparky can write grading instructions for itself that account for the adaptive nature of the assessment.

49:30 Computer science and code tools in Flint

A participant asks about content for AP Computer Science. Teddy confirms a dedicated session is planned and demonstrates Flint's code writing tool, which supports a full library of programming languages with a live execution environment for languages marked with a green play icon.

He shows examples including a Python loops activity, a statistics activity using R, and an interactive sorting algorithm visualization where students can explore bubble sort and other algorithms as a lesson opener.

51:20 AI accuracy in math and iterative improvement

A teacher raises concerns about AI making arithmetic errors, sharing experiences from previous years where students discovered mistakes in AI-generated math content. Teddy explains that Flint continuously updates to the latest AI models for accuracy and factual correctness, and that the team actively addresses specific inaccuracies reported by teachers.

He emphasizes the iterative nature of improvement, noting that teacher feedback directly informs how Sparky processes and presents mathematical content.

53:52 Tier 3 instruction and standards-aligned activities

A teacher working with four students in a Tier 3 intervention setting asks how to use Flint to create individualized activities while providing direct instruction to one student at a time. Teddy demonstrates how to import Common Core standards into a class, create activities aligned to specific standards, and use private sharing to assign different activities to different students.

He walks through the workflow: import the relevant standard sets into the class curriculum section, create a new activity referencing the specific standard a student needs, set the activity to private, and invite only the relevant student. He estimates that creating four individualized activities for the next day could take 20 to 40 minutes.

Teddy also suggests structuring activities to ask students where the teacher left off with them, so Sparky can check in and continue from the point of direct instruction.

1:01:44 Organizing activities and classes in Flint

A teacher asks about best practices for organizing a growing library of activities. Teddy demonstrates several organization tools: dragging classes to reorder them on the homepage, assigning consistent colors to classes by subject, and using folders within a class to group activities by topic or unit.

He shows how to create folders, move activities between them, and use the folder view to filter what is displayed, helping teachers navigate large collections of resources.

1:05:41 Student profiles and learning history

Teddy demonstrates how teachers can view individual student profiles from the People section within a class, showing strengths, areas of improvement, completed sessions, and chats across all classes. A teacher asks about importing external assessment data such as MAP or IXL scores; Teddy notes this is not currently supported but acknowledges it as valuable feedback for the product team.

1:07:16 Closing and resources

Teddy wraps up by reminding attendees that the recording will be available on the Flint YouTube channel and webinars page. He encourages teachers to reach out with questions, share what they are building, and explore the Flint Public Library for activities shared by the session's presenters and other educators.

Have a use case you'd like us to cover in a future session? Reach out and let us know!