With the launch of ChatGPT 5.0, many people are testing it out and circulating their results. In our “random” Slack channel, where we share anything interesting that crosses our path, Filipe from IT posted one that stood out. He’d come across a simple math problem, double-checked it himself, and confirmed it was real:

As you can see, the AI-generated solution walked through clean, logical-looking steps and somehow concluded:

x = –0.21

I have two engineering degrees, and if I hadn’t known there was an error, I might not have spotted it. If I’d been tired, distracted, or rushing, I would have almost certainly missed it because I would have assumed AI could handle something this simple.

Most of us in the MaplePrimes community already understand that AI needs to be used with care. But our students may not always remember, especially at the start of the school year if they’ve already grown used to relying on AI without question. 

And if we’re honest, trusting without double-checking isn’t new. Before AI, plenty of us took shortcuts: splitting up the work, swapping answers, and just assuming they were right. I remember doing it myself in university, sometimes without even thinking twice. The tools might be different now, but that habit of skipping the “are we sure?” step has been around for a long time.

The difference now is that general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT have become the first place we turn for almost anything we do. They respond confidently and are often correct, which can lead us to become complacent. We trust them without question. If students develop the habit of doing this, especially while they are still learning, the stakes can be much higher as they carry those habits into work, research, and other areas of their lives.

The example above is making its rounds on social media because it’s memorable. It’s a basic problem, yet the AI still got it wrong and in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.

Using it in the classroom can be a great way to help students remember that AI’s answers need to be checked. It’s not about discouraging them from using AI, but about reinforcing the habit of verifying results and thinking critically about what they see.

So here’s my suggestion:

• Show this example in your class, no matter the subject. If your students are using AI, they’ll benefit from seeing it.
• Spend 10 minutes discussing it.
• Use it as a jumping-off point to talk about what’s OK and not OK when using AI for your course.
• Share other examples like this throughout the year as small reminders, so “critical thinking” becomes second nature.

This isn’t just about catching an AI’s bad subtraction. It’s about building a culture of verification and reasoning in our students. The tools will keep improving, but so will the temptation to turn off our own thinking.

If we can help students get into the habit of checking, AI can be a powerful partner without putting them on autopilot.

To the MaplePrimes community: How do you talk to your students to help them build strong habits when working with AI? Do you bring in examples like this one, or use other strategies? I’d love it if you could share your thoughts, tips, and ideas.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new Student Success Platform! Over the past several months, our academic team has dedicated itself to understanding how we can better support institutions in addressing their concerns around student retention rates. The numbers tell a concerning story: In the U.S., nearly 25% of first-year undergraduates don’t complete their studies, and in STEM fields, the numbers are even higher. In both STEM programs and non-STEM programs with math gateway courses, struggles with math are often a key reason students do not, or cannot, continue their studies. This has a profound impact on both the students’ futures and the institution’s revenue and funding.

From what we’re hearing from institutions and instructors, one of the most pressing issues is the lack of readiness among first-year students, particularly in math courses. With larger class sizes and students arriving with varying levels of preparedness, instructors face challenges in providing the personalized support that is essential. Additionally, many students don’t fully utilize existing resources, such as office hours or TA sessions, which increases their risk of falling behind and ultimately dropping out.

Our new Student Success Platform is designed to tackle these issues head-on. It combines all of our existing tools with exciting new features to help students succeed on their own terms—without adding to instructors' already busy workloads. The early feedback has been fantastic, and we can’t wait for you to see the impact it can make.

You can read more about the Student Success Platform here: https://www.maplesoft.com/student-success-platform/

Attention Maple enthusiasts! It gives me great pleasure to announce Maple 2024! Maple 2024 brings together a collection of new features and enhancements carefully designed to enrich your mathematical explorations. Maple 2024 is the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of people, and there is far more in it than I can cover here. But I’d like to share with you some of my favorite features in this release.

AI Formula Assistant

The AI Formula Assistant in Maple 2024 is undoubtedly the feature that excites me the most, especially considering how often I’m asked the question: 'When will Maple include AI features?' This assistant serves as your new mathematical companion and will change the way you look up and enter formulas and equations. Driven by advanced AI technology, it presents a range of relevant options based on your search query. Alongside suggestions, you'll also receive detailed explanations for each formula and its parameters so you can select the one you need, and then you can insert the formula into your document at a click of a button, as a proper Maple expression.

NaturalLanguage Package

The Formula Assistant is built on top of the new NaturalLanguage package, which integrates powerful language models like GPT-4 and ChatGPT from OpenAI into Maple. With this feature, you can leverage large language models to process natural language within Maple. Ask the AI to explain concepts, provide additional details, find specific Maple commands, and more. Of course, since this is a Maple package, you can also use it as a basis to build your own AI-powered applications inside Maple. We’re really looking forward to seeing what you will do with it!

Argument Completion
We’ve had a lot of requests from people who wanted Maple’s command completion features to do even more, and I’m happy to say that Maple 2024 delivers. The new argument completion feature in Maple 2024 is poised to significantly enhance your experience with commands. For many users, including myself, not being aware of all the options a command takes is a challenge, often leading me to refer to help pages for clarification. With argument completion, that's no longer a concern. Just enter the command with the help of the existing command completion feature, then automatic argument completion takes over to guide you through the rest. Give it a try with the 'plot' command!

Check My Work

A personal favorite feature that's gotten even better in Maple 2024 is Check My Work. As someone who has tutored students, I vividly recall their stress before exams, often receiving emails and text messages from them seeking last-minute help. At the time, I found myself wishing the students had a way to check their work themselves, so we would all be less stressed! So I was super excited when we added the first Check My Work feature a couple of years ago, and am very happy that it gets better ever year. In Maple 2024, we’ve expanded its capabilities to support problems involving factoring, simplification, and limits.

Scrollable Matrices:
This feature will definitely resonate with many of the engineers in the Maple Primes community. If you're someone who works with worksheets containing large matrices, you've likely wished that you could scroll the matrices inside your document instead of having to launch a separate matrix browser. With Maple 2024, your wish has come true.

Color Bars

And finally, for those of you who appreciated the addition of color bars in Maple 2023 but wanted to see them extended to more 2D and 3D plots, you'll be delighted to know that this is exactly what we’ve done. We’ve also added new customization options, providing you with greater control over appearance.

This is just a partial glimpse of what's new in Maple 2024. For a comprehensive overview, visit What’s New in Maple 2024.

The moment we've all been waiting for has arrived: Maple 2023 is here!

With this release we continue to pursue our mission to provide powerful technology to explore, derive, capture, solve and disseminate mathematical problems and their applications, and to make math easier to learn, understand, and use. Bearing this in mind, our team of mathematicians and developers have dedicated the last year to adding new features and enhancements that not only improve the math engine but make that math engine more easily accessible within a user-friendly interface.

And if you ever wonder where our team gets inspiration, you don't need to look further than Maple Primes. Many of the improvements that went into Maple 2023 came as a direct result of feedback from users. I’ll highlight a few of those user-requested features below, and you can learn more about these, and many, many other improvements, in What’s New in Maple 2023.

• The Plot Builder in Maple 2023 now allows you to build interactive plot explorations where parameters are controlled by sliders or dials, and customize them as easily as you can other plots

• In Maple 2023, 2-D contour and density plots now feature a color bar to show the values of the gradations.

• For those who write a lot of code:  You can now open your .mpl Maple code files directly in Maple’s code editor, where you can  view and edit the file from inside Maple using the editor’s syntax highlighting, command completion, and automatic indenting.

• Integration has been improved in many ways. Here’s one of them:  The definite integration method that works via MeijerG convolutions now does a better job of checking conditions on parameters so that they are only applied under proper assumptions. It also tells you the conditions under which the method could have produced an answer, so if your problem does meet those conditions, you can add the appropriate assumptions to get your result.
• Many people have asked that we make it easier for them to create more complex interactive Math Apps and applications that require programming, such as interactive clickable plots, quizzes that provide feedback, examples that provide solution steps. And I’m pleased to announce that we’ve done that in Maple 2023 with the introduction of the Quiz Builder and the Canvas Scripting Gallery.
• • The new Quiz Builder comes loaded with sample quizzes and makes it easy to create your own custom quiz questions. Launch the quiz builder next time you want to author interactive quizzes with randomized questions, different response types, hints, feedback, and show the solution. It’s probably one of my favorite features in Maple 2023.

• The Scripting Gallery in Maple 2023 provides 44 templates and modifiable examples that make it easier to create more complex Math Apps and interactive applications that require programming. The Maple code used to build each application in the scripting gallery can be easily viewed, copied and modified, so you can customize specific applications or use the code as a starting point for your own work

• Finally, here’s one that is bound to make a lot of people happy: You can finally have more than one help page open at the same time!

For more information about all the new features and enhancements in Maple 2023, check out the What’s New in Maple 2023.

P.S. In case you weren’t aware - in addition to Maple, the Maplesoft Mathematics Suite includes a variety of other complementary software products, including online and mobile solutions, that help you teach and learn math and math-related courses.  Even avid Maple users may find something of interest!

As we head back to school, I want to take a moment to thank all the math teachers out there who take on the demanding yet overlooked task of educating our children, teenagers, and young people. 

I'm where I am today because my calculus teacher, Prof. Srinivasan, was unwavering in her belief that my classmates and I could master any math topic, including calculus. Her conviction in me gave me the confidence to believe I could 'do' math. While Prof. Srinivasan made teaching look easy, I'm acutely aware that teaching math is no easy feat. Speaking with math educators regularly, I can appreciate how challenging teaching math is today compared to a decade ago. Not only do they have to teach the subject, but they must be able to teach it in-person and online, to a group of students that may not be up to speed on the prerequisite material, and in an era where disruptive technologies vie for their student's attention. No wonder math educators are so anxious about returning to the classroom this fall!

And while I wish I could abracadabra your worries away, what I can do is offer you the opportunity to use Maple Learn, a tool built to support the utopian vision of a world where all students love math. A world where math is for everyone, not just the gifted, and the purpose of math class is to explore and marvel at the wonders of the universe, not just get to the correct answer.

Slightly more concretely, Maple Learn is a flexible interactive environment for exploring concepts, solving problems, and creating rich online math content. I've seen educators use Maple Learn to help their students: 

• Grasp a definition or particularly tricky proof (for example, Formal Definition of the  Partial Derivative)
• Explore a concept and question their initial assumptions and beliefs (such as Is it an Odd or Even Function)
• Master a particular solving technique through drill and practice worksheets (Calculating Volumes)
• Work collaboratively on a math project (Designing a Roller Coaster)

I’ve talked to lots of instructors, in math, and in courses like economics and physics that use math, who have lots of ideas of how to engage their students and deepen their understanding through interactive online activities. What they don’t have are the tools, programming experience, deployment platform, or time to implement their vision. Fortunately, Maple Learn makes it incredibly easy to develop and share your own content, and all you need are your ideas and a web browser. But you don’t need to start from scratch. You can choose from an extensive, constantly growing repository of ready-made, easily customizable content covering a wide range of topics. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is, but since we are well aware that instructors are extremely busy people, we also have content development services that can help you transform your static content into interactive lessons.

If you haven't looked at Maple Learn, or it's been a while since you last saw it, you can visit Reinventing Math Education with Maple Learn for more information, including an upcoming webinar you might be interested in attending and a special offer on Maple Learn for Maple campuses. And if you ever want to discuss ways Maple Learn might help you, or have ideas on how to make it better, please reach out. I'm always up for good conversation. 

And for all the dedicated teachers who are taking a deep breath and heading back into the classroom this fall, thank you.