Bring the worksheet, not a description of it

TL;DR:

• Retyping a worksheet loses details, and the details are often the point.

• DuckyHelper sees your work, so you can show the actual page.

• Homework files are part of DuckyHelper for exactly this.

When people ask a chat assistant for homework help, the first step is often to rewrite the problem. You copy the text, describe the diagram, say what the table looked like and hope you got it right. This post is about why we think that step should not exist.

Retyping loses details

A worksheet is more than its words. There is a diagram with labels on it, a number with a unit in a corner, a note in the margin, a question that continues on the next page, and your own crossings-out. When you retype or describe it, some of that disappears, and you rarely know which part you dropped.

The cost shows up later. The explanation you get is an answer to your description of the problem, not the problem itself. If the description missed the detail that mattered, the help misses it too, and neither of you knows why it feels off.

Showing the actual page

DuckyHelper sees your screen while the pill is open, so the simplest approach is to put the worksheet on the screen and ask. Press the key and say "help me with number four." It sees what you see, including the diagram, the units and your working so far.

Seeing your work, and not only the question, changes the kind of help possible. Instead of solving the problem from scratch, DuckyHelper can find the step where yours went wrong and circle it on the page. That is far more useful than being handed a clean solution to compare with.

Homework files are the part of DuckyHelper built for this kind of work, and the idea behind them is the same: bring the real thing, not a description of it.

What happens next

Once it can see the page, the conversation goes the way it would with a person next to you.

1. You ask about a question, out loud.

2. DuckyHelper looks at the page and answers out loud, and circles or marks the part it is talking about.

3. If the idea needs working through, it opens the blackboard and builds it up with you one step at a time.

4. If you want to check yourself afterward, you can ask for a quiz.

A note on doing the work yourself

Seeing your worksheet makes it easy to get an answer, and we do not think the answer is the point. The aim of DuckyHelper is real understanding, not only a finished page. When you want to try a step first, say so, and ask it to check your working instead of giving the result. It will do what you ask.

A small example

Say a worksheet has a triangle with two sides labelled and a question that asks for the third. If you retype it as "a right triangle with sides 3 and 4, find the other side", you have quietly assumed which side is the hypotenuse. If the page actually marked the unknown as one of the shorter sides, your description changed the problem.

With the page on screen, DuckyHelper sees which side is marked and answers the problem that is really there. The cost to you is the few seconds it takes to open the page.

Why this is a design choice

The same idea runs through the rest of the app: the screen is the shared context. You should not have to translate what you see into words for an assistant that can already see it. Every step you remove between having a problem and getting help is a step where something could have gone missing.

One more benefit is easy to miss: you stay in your own material. The page keeps its own layout, so when DuckyHelper circles a line you recognize it at once, because it is the same line you were already looking at.

If a worksheet runs to several pages, take it a question at a time. Scroll to the one you want, press the key and ask about that one. That way each answer is about the question in front of you.

What this means for you

Next time you are stuck on a worksheet, skip the retyping. Open the page, press the key and ask. If you are not sure it is working, try it on one question, and judge by whether it talks about what is actually on your page. You can try DuckyHelper for 10 minutes without a card; get the app on the download page.