Tutors: a chat that teaches your way
A tutor is the simplest kind of activity in Novedu: a chat with an AI that follows your instructions, on a topic you choose. You decide what it teaches, how it talks to students, and where it draws the line. A well-written tutor explains ideas, asks guiding questions, and nudges students forward instead of doing the work for them.
You don’t train an AI model to get this behaviour. You write a prompt, a set of plain-language instructions, and the tutor follows it. If the tutor answers in a way you don’t like, you change the instructions and try again.
What students experience
Section titled “What students experience”Students open a tutor and see a chat. Before the first message, the empty screen greets them: you can replace the default greeting with your own, and add a short description that tells students what this tutor helps with.
You can also offer clickable starter questions on the empty screen. A student picks one, the question lands in the chat input ready to edit, and the conversation begins. Starter questions are a gentle way to show students what the tutor is good at, especially for a class that has never talked to an AI tutor before.
From there it’s a normal back-and-forth conversation. Students ask in their own words, the tutor answers within your rules, and they can dig deeper for as long as they need. Nobody is graded, and there is no fixed path through the material.
Students can also start a tutor conversation over. A button above the chat clears what they’ve discussed and begins a fresh conversation, and it asks them to confirm first. It helps when a conversation has drifted off topic, or when a student wants to approach a question again from the beginning. The tutor won’t remember anything from the earlier conversation, but you still see that conversation under the code, and a student who chats both before and after starting over counts as two conversations in your statistics.
How you shape a tutor
Section titled “How you shape a tutor”Everything the tutor does comes from instructions you write. Typical instructions cover:
- Who it is and what it teaches. For example, a friendly tutor for sorting algorithms, aimed at 16-year-olds who know basic TypeScript.
- How it teaches. For example, ask guiding questions, give hints before solutions, and have students predict the next step before revealing it.
- What it must not do. For example, never hand over the finished solution, stay on the allowed topics, and avoid concepts the class hasn’t learned yet.
You write these instructions in your own words. For rules you want to apply across many tutors, such as a teaching style or a safety policy, you can also pull in a fragment, a named piece of prompt written once and reused. That way a whole team of teachers shares one carefully worded safety policy instead of each rewriting it.
By default, tutor chats are anonymous: the app doesn’t record which student had which conversation.
When a tutor is the right choice
Section titled “When a tutor is the right choice”Pick a tutor when students need open-ended help: preparing for a test, practising a skill, getting unstuck on homework, or exploring a topic at their own pace. It shines where a conversation beats a worksheet.
A tutor doesn’t assess anything. When you want students to answer set questions and receive graded feedback, build a quiz instead. When students should produce a text of their own with an AI coach beside them, build a writing activity.