Khanmigo Review

Is Khanmigo any good? Read our Khanmigo review and learn what we think of Khan Academy’s AI powered tutor. Our honest, uncompensated opinion.

What Does Khanmigo Do?

If you’ve played around with ChatGPT, you know that AI powered communication has improved a ton in the past year or two. Khanmigo is a ChatGPT powered AI tutoring bot.

But Khanmigo is very different from ChatGPT. Type a question into ChatGPT, and it will spout out an answer. Type the same question into Khanmigo, and the chatbot will guide you towards creating your own answer. Khan Academy very cleverly took technology that was stressing teachers out and showed them how it could be helpful, guiding student learning instead of replacing student learning with computer-generated answers. Here is Sal Khan’s introduction of the technology:

Khanmigo also offers lesson planning and other support for teachers and homeschoolers. You can see this feature demoed here:

It includes an entire section on deciding whether to apply to college, career counseling, and even college essay feedback.

What Does Khanmigo Cost?

Right now, you unlock access to Khanmigo by setting up a recurring donation to Khan Academy of $99 annually or $10 monthly.

Once you donate, it can take a little while for Khan Academy to unlock your access to Khanmigo. Don’t panic if you can’t access Khanmigo right away.

If you have a parent account set up in Khan Academy with child accounts linked up, you can then give your children access to this chatbot tutor.

Is Khanmigo Any Good? Our Khanmigo Review

I set up a recurring donation to gain access to this program. My daughters haven’t played with it much, but my 10th grade son is finding it incredibly helpful. This is our honest review, and I’ll update it as we use this technology more.

Using Khanmigo for Help With Math

Khanmigo has been a game changer for helping my 10th grader with math. Up until now, any time he got stuck he relied on either me or my husband to get unstuck. This meant that he could only make progress when we were available to help him. Even though we are both good at math, sometimes we had to do some review ourselves, or learn updated math terms before we could help.

Now, he mostly uses Khanmigo for help. This removes a ton of household stress. Khanmigo knows all of the updated math terms and methods. He says it does sometimes make mistakes (there is a warning to this effect at the top of each page). Human tutors also sometimes make mistakes (including my son’s math teacher and me and my husband). Khanmigo makes different mistakes from humans, so they are usually easy to spot.

Using Khanmigo for English

So far, we have used Khanmigo to discuss synonyms, phrasing, and weak points in essays my son writes. It will point out an area that needs improvement, and give ideas of how to write better without actually writing anything for you. It has games you can use to practice vocabulary and other topics.

There is a section where students can practice debating various topics. This is great for building critical thinking skills, and preparing for speech and debate tournaments.

My personal favorite English feature is the ability to chat with a literary character. What a fun way to get to know the protagonist of a book you’re reading better! This is also an opportunity for students to critique whether or not they agree with the program’s portrayal of the character. Did they get Eeyore right?

Click here to read our review of Night Zookeeper, and online writing program for younger children (ages 6-12)

Khanmigo Review: Help With History

For history, Khan Academy can create review questions on a topic, help you create a timeline (by making you come up with the topics that should be on the timeline and then offering interesting details about them), offer videos to help you learn about a topic, and more.

Click to read also: Tips for Using Timelines to Teach History

Khanmigo also lets you chat with a historical figure, just like you can chat with a literary figure. The image above is just the first half of a list of people students can “talk” with.

Reviewing Khanmigo’s Science Support

Khanmigo helps explain science topics. It is text based, which comes with some real limitations, but for anything that is easy to communicate in a writing it is pretty solid. It also offers review of a topic before taking a test, and it can take you to Khan Academy videos to learn more.

College Admissions and Career Development Support

This section of Khanmigo feels really helpful for high school students who are trying to figure out what to do after graduation. Khanmigo even offers college essay critiques!

Student Led Learning

Last but certainly not least, Khanmigo offers a student led learning section where students can select a topic that they want to explore. I think that unschooling parents will love this feature!

Khanmigo for Homeschoolers and Teachers

Khanmigo is also a tool for teachers. It offers lesson plan support, exit ticket questions, it can help you create a rubric, and it can even write a fun class summary poem. The lesson plan creation tool is one that I see being especially helpful for homeschooling parents.

This is a lesson plan I asked Khanmigo to create for an introduction to middle school physics.

Khanmigo Review: What We Like

Overall, this is an amazing resource. I highly recommend it, whether your child is enrolled in a public or private school, or homeschooled. It offers review games, lessons and exercises, and lots of helpful feedback on student assignments. This post is pretty long, and I know I still haven’t come close to showcasing all that this program has to offer.

Khanmigo Review: What We Would Change

Khanmigo is in beta (testing) mode right now, and it can’t do everything. It occasionally made mistakes when helping my son with his math work. Because AI thinks differently from humans, these were pretty obvious mistakes and so easy to catch. Most of the time it is super helpful.

When Khanmigo can’t do something, it really can’t, but it doesn’t always understand that. Since you can use this program to write lesson plans, I tried to have it create a lesson plan about itself. Khanmigo creates lesson plans by finding exercises, videos, and articles that are on Khan Academy. Since there weren’t any educational resources about Khanmigo on Khan Academy, it could not create a lesson plan introducing itself. But, instead of explaining that, it assumed I made a typo and gave me lesson plans with the prefix khan (or something similar).

There is a space in Khanmigo where you can rate its response to your request, and I assume this feedback will be used to improve the technology.

Why Does Khanmigo Run Out of Power?

If you look at the screenshots in this post, there is a little battery symbol in the top right. This is because you can use up your allotment of Khanmigo’s AI power. This is sort of annoying, but honestly we haven’t used up its power yet so it must be a pretty generous allotment. If you do use up your power, you can come back to a full power bank the next day.

Update: a couple of days after I wrote this review Khan Academy announced they multiplied everyone’s power supply by 20, so it’s extremely unlikely you’ll run out of power now.

Have you ever used Khanmigo? What did you think of our khanmigo review? Do you have other questions about it that you would like us to try to answer?

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MaryAnne Kochenderfer

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MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.