Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1546198
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 16 AUGUST 2026 FEATURE Fighting AI with AI: One teacher's homework problem, and the platform it inspired WEEK after week, physics teach- er Miguel Micallef's students' homework came back with the right answers. Every step worked out correctly. But in class it was a different story. When the same problems came up without a device near- by, many of those same stu- dents couldn't work through them. Micallef pinned this down on the students using AI at home to help them. But rather than banning AI from the classroom, Micallef, alongside co-founder Mikea Dimech, decided to build a platform designed to work against the exact habit gener- al-purpose tools encourage. The result is Hedgehog Edu- cation, a Maltese AI start-up built around a single concern— cognitive offloading. In less complicated terms, cognitive offloading is the tendency to outsource thinking to AI rather than develop it. Dimech said Hedgehog never gives direct answers, unlike a general-purpose AI. Teachers upload their mate- rials, and students work with an AI tutor that asks Socratic questions instead of solving problems for them. "ChatGPT would give answers immedi- ately if asked, but Hedgehog won't; it only asks questions to encourage independent think- ing." A pilot study at St Martin's College with 86 Year 9 stu- dents found that before us- ing the platform, 97.8% used AI tools for homework, with 73.9% turning to ChatGPT when stuck. Over three-quar- ters (76.1%) felt guilty or un- comfortable about AI use, and 63% said AI made it too easy to get answers without thinking. "Our concern is cognitive offloading, which is when stu- dents, or anyone, outsource their thinking process to an external entity, in this case AI, and do not develop critical thinking themselves," Dimech said. "What do we stand to lose when an entire generation of students has grown up like this, with a costly habit of using AI as a shortcut?" Following the pilot, the share of students turning to ChatGPT when stuck fell from 73.9% to 12.8%, while those leaving a question blank when stuck dropped from 23.9% to 2.6%. Reported confidence and pre- paredness for tests rose from 30.4% to 69.2%, and the share of students who felt they un- derstood the topic better after completing homework rose from 39.1% to 71.8%. Almost three-quarters of students (74.4%) said the AI tutor helped them think through problems rather than spoon-feeding them answers, and 82.1% disagreed that using the platform felt like cheating. One student, in an open-end- ed response, wrote: "I used to be close to clueless with phys- ics, now not only have I gotten much better but I've started to enjoy the topic more." Another described how the platform helped them realise they had used the wrong for- mula for a pressure question, walking them through the cor- rect method rather than simply correcting it. Once an exercise is complete, teachers see a dashboard with class patterns and individual insights. Dimech said the plat- form isn't meant for correction or assessment due to EU AI Act restrictions on automated grading and Hedgehog's goal of avoiding reducing learning to a pass/fail check. Teachers are estimated to save several hours a week that would otherwise go on manual correction. The platform is also restricted in scope. Students cannot use it to ask about topics unrelat- ed to the specific exercise they are working on. "If they have something irrelevant, it will di- rect them back into the flow of the exercise," Dimech said. Hedgehog ran its pilot at St Martin's College between April and June. Going forward, the company is planning on work- ing with independent, church and public schools. For now, schools rather than students or parents pay for ac- cess, though Dimech said the company is open to eventually addressing the private tuition market directly. The platform currently supports physics, with chemistry, biology and maths in development. Humanities and language subjects are not on the near- term roadmap, Dimech said, as they involve a fundamentally different mode of learning than STEM subjects. Looking ahead, Dimech said Hedgehog is open to expand- ing into further education, in- cluding university and MCAST level, though this is not an im- mediate focus. "We have an underlying mis- sion of tackling cognitive off- loading, to personalise learn- ing for students, and to make sure educators are equipped with the tools they need to give proper feedback," he added. "This applies not just to home- work, but to many different facets of education." JULIANA ZAMMIT jzammit@mediatoday.com.mt A screenshot of a chat guiding the student to reach their own conclusion and answer (From left to right) Miguel Micallef, Mikea Dimech, CEO, and Nigel Caruana, from Hedgehog Education (Photo: Hedgehog Education)