“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

I’m in Singapore this week for a conference by the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future and yesterday we visited Boon Lay Gardens, a public primary school.

I was blown away by the intentionality and systems thinking behind their work. Across many other things they use AI as a cognitive scaffolding, but not for cognitive offloading.

For example, instead of just grading math problems, teachers use an “altering copilot” to diagnose why a student got the area of a triangle wrong. If the AI detects that they are struggling with calculation rather than geometry, it personalizes the next step, generating 10 questions on multiplication to help the student excel at that specific mini-skill

And phones have their own mini-lockers while children are learning.