08-Oct-2026
12:30pm-2:00pm

Hybrid: Seminar Room 3, 4/F, 3 Sassoon Road or Zoom

Teaching does two things. One is delivering the content, and the other is answering the person who did not follow it. The first was solved long ago; good lectures on almost any subject are free online. The second has never scaled, because answering someone takes a person, so it gets rationed — by the size of the room, by office hours, by who is willing to raise a hand. Ark Junior is an attempt at the second job. It takes the slides a teacher already has and turns them into a lecture a student can stop at any point to ask a question. Each answer is grounded to course material, and points back to the slide it came from. In this session I will cover why we built it, what two summer pilots showed about the questions students ask when asking is cheap, and what the deployment cost a teacher in practice.

Ark Junior does not replace a human-delivered lecture, and the reasons for that may not be (only) technical ones. It is meant as an extension: to lower the barrier to asking, to give you a wider surface for working out backwards where students are struggling, and to scale your bandwidth for answering. Its ceiling is the quality of your slides. In its current shape it is not built for clinical or problem-, project- and case-based teaching, though there may be a hybrid version of those worth reaching for. I would welcome the discussion and suggestions.

 

Professor Zheng Zhang
School of Computing and Data Science, HKU

 

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