If you haven’t read Building an AI Tutor That Aids Learning, go do that first. I’ll wait. This page assumes you’re already on board with the idea that pretending students aren’t using AI is like putting your fingers in your ears during a fire alarm—ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. We’re past that debate. This is what happens next.
Guide to Creating an AI Tutor: I wrote the guide you can download below because once I stopped pretending AI wasn’t in my classroom, the real work started. And it wasn’t about learning Python or mastering prompt engineering. It was about teaching. The questions that mattered to me weren’t “Should I use AI?” but “What should it actually do for my students?” and “What should it absolutely never do?” How do I keep struggle productive instead of soul-crushing? How do I offer support without accidentally doing all the thinking for them?
Why I Built This
This guide isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s my specific example from my first-year Property Law class. I didn’t build this tutor because I’m into edtech for the sake of edtech. I built it because every single year, the same learning problem shows up like a bad penny. My students think they understand something because they can recognize it. They see a rule, they nod knowingly, and then I change the facts slightly and suddenly they’re lost in the woods without a compass. AI, used carelessly, makes this problem way worse. Used thoughtfully, I realized it could actually expose the gap and make my students face it head-on.
The guide walks through how I tackled this, how I structured my tutor, and why I made the choices I made. It’s less about the prompts and more about the pedagogy—because honestly, I found that prompting was the easy part. The hard part was designing interactions that force my students to explain, apply, and reason instead of just copy-pasting answers. I talk a lot about constraints, because that’s where I see the learning actually happen. I also talk about uncertainty, because there are still parts of this where I’m genuinely not sure I’ve got it right.
What This Is (And Isn’t)
This is not a “how to automate teaching so I can golf more” document. It’s my attempt at a “how I’m trying to stay responsible while teaching in a world where AI is already here whether I like it or not” document. If you’re looking for efficiency hacks in building your own AI tutor, this guide will help. If you’re looking for how to use AI to better engage students with the material, this guide is designed specifically for you.
I put this post in The Classroom because this is the learning part of Trudeau.ai. This guide is something I think you should read, argue with me about, adapt for yourself, and even improve it and report back. If you’re thinking seriously about how to bring AI into your teaching without accidentally lobotomizing the learning process, this is where I’d start.
Grab the full guide below. You do have to subscribe to my email list, but I promise it will be worth it as I build out the site – and I won’t spam you or sell your information.
Note: If you’ve already subscribed to my email list, THANK YOU. You can follow the link if you do not have the guide already, or you can email me at chris@trudeau.ai, and I’ll send you one directly. Thanks for being a subscriber.
