#222 AI in Education with Becky Allen
From Mr Barton Maths Podcast by Craig Barton
May 13, 2026 · 1h 36m
About this episode
Craig Barton interviews Becky Allen about the role of AI in education, focusing on its use as a personal tutor and its implications for learning environments.
In this long-awaited sequel (eight years after her last appearance), Craig welcomes back Becky Allen — education researcher, co-founder of Teacher Tap, co-author of The Teacher Gap , and now a consultant to the US-based Alpha School chain — for a deep dive into AI in education, with a particular focus on AI as a personal tutor. Becky is a self-confessed AI optimist who uses LLMs for almost everything (with a fervent endorsement of WhisperFlow voice transcription as a game-changer for giving models richer context). She walks through what she's been seeing inside Alpha School, where students do roughly two hours a day on AI-powered learning apps and spend the rest of their time on project-based learning, sports, and life skills. Her clearest examples of where AI tutoring genuinely shines are in generative prerequisite-knowledge conversations and in forcing students to engage step-by-step with worked examples — pulling them out of the passive eye-darting that kills most textbook learning. From there, Craig walks her through a battery of common sceptical pushbacks (screen time, scalability, Alpha's wealthy demographic, motivation without an audience, the Khanmigo flop, applicability…
People in this episode
Host: Craig Barton
Guest: Becky Allen
Topics covered
- AI in education
- personal tutoring
- project-based learning
- AI-powered learning apps
- educational research
- micro-schools
Keywords
- AI
- education
- tutoring
- learning apps
- micro-schools
- project-based learning
- educational technology
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Teacher Tap, Alpha School
Products: WhisperFlow
Books & works: The Teacher Gap
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
- #221 Building an AI tutor with Google DeepMind with Bibi Groot (Eedi’s Chief Impact Officer) · May 6, 2026 · 1h 47m
- #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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