Lathoa, a math app for kids where the AI is wrong on purpose

About Lathoa, a math app for kids where the AI is wrong on purpose

Errol is a robot powered by real AI, and he gets math wrong on purpose. Your kid's job: catch the mistakes. Critical thinking for the AI age.

In the maker’s words

I made this for kids around 10 to 14. A robot called Errol solves a math problem step by step and one of the steps is wrong. The kid has to find it and say what's wrong with it. Sometimes nothing is wrong, so just saying "there's a mistake" every time doesn't work. The user needs to enter an explanation if she finds an error to gain more XP; speed matters also for more points. There is no direct interaction or chatting with an LLM. Lathoa's harness is stable and has many evaluation steps to catch inconsistencies and prompt injections. You can play one on the homepage without signing up. The part that surprised me: it's hard to get an LLM to be wrong on purpose. Half the time it gives you the right answer and calls it wrong, or a "mistake" that's actually correct. So every case gets checked before a kid sees it. Where it can, a plain arithmetic check redoes the math exactly. A second mode…

Where people found it

• Hacker NewsShow HN: Lathoa, a math app for kids where the AI is wrong on purpose52 points50 comments3 days ago