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

• #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
• #217 AI in Education with Adam Boxer · March 25, 2026 · 1h 35m
• #216 AI in Education with Barbara Oakley · March 18, 2026 · 1h 7m
• #215 AI in Education with Daisy Christodoulou · March 11, 2026 · 1h 21m
• #214 Research in Action 31: Early Years Financial Literacy with Iro Xenidou-Dervou · March 4, 2026 · 41 min

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