#221 Building an AI tutor with Google DeepMind with Bibi Groot (Eedi’s Chief Impact Officer)
From Mr Barton Maths Podcast by Craig Barton
May 6, 2026 · 1h 47m
About this episode
Craig Barton interviews Bibi Groot about the research and development of AI tutoring at Eedi and its collaboration with Google DeepMind.
In this episode of the Mr Barton Maths podcast, Craig sits down with Bibi Groot, behavioural scientist at Eedi, to unpack the rigorous research behind their ed-tech work. Bibi traces her journey from the UK's Behavioural Insights Team — where she applied frameworks like EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely) to public policy — to becoming Eedi's first behavioural scientist after a stint completing a PhD at UCL and having twins. The conversation builds methodically from the fundamentals of randomised control trials (and why they're so notoriously difficult to run well in schools) through the headline results of Eedi's two-year, 20-school RCT showing that students using the platform gained the equivalent of two to four extra months of progress, before diving into the much-publicised Google DeepMind collaboration. That study, run with LearnLM and a human-in-the-loop safety net, found that an AI tutor matched a human tutor on immediate question success and actually outperformed humans on short-term transfer questions — likely because the AI was relentlessly Socratic where time-pressured human tutors tended to short-circuit students' metacognition. Bibi closes by previewing Eedi's…
People in this episode
Host: Craig Barton
Guest: Bibi Groot
Topics covered
- AI tutoring
- educational technology
- randomised control trials
- behavioural science
- student progress
- metacognition
- international education
Keywords
- AI tutor
- Eedi
- Google DeepMind
- randomised control trials
- student progress
- behavioural science
- metacognition
- education technology
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Eedi, Google DeepMind, UK's Behavioural Insights Team, UCL, LearnLM
Places: Guyana, India, Sub-Saharan Africa
More episodes of Mr Barton Maths Podcast
- #224 AI in Education with Kris Boulton · June 2, 2026 · 2h 10m
- #223 What do 10,000 teachers think about AI? · May 20, 2026 · 1h 59m
- #222 AI in Education with Becky Allen · May 13, 2026 · 1h 36m
- #220 AI in Education with Dan Meyer · April 29, 2026 · 1h 26m
- #219 AI in Education with Simon Woodhead (Eedi's Chief Data Scientist) · April 22, 2026 · 1h 47m
- #218 AI in Education with Carl Hendrick · April 1, 2026 · 1h 5m
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