Luna is a live AI assistant that enables direct chat to build and edit activities and assessments, streamlining prep time for various content like bell ringers, lessons frameworks, quizzes, and exams.
Here’s what you can expect from Luna in Formative today:
Activity creation: Generate a range of activities like bell ringers, exit tickets, polls, quizzes, and more. Luna can also generate activities based on uploaded content.
Instant assessments: Upload your images and PDFs directly into your Luna chat to create assessments quickly.
Personalized outputs: Luna asks about your goals before generating any activity, and asks follow-up questions throughout the process to learn more about what you want to get out of the resources you create. Plus, Luna already knows your account profile, so responses are tailored to your specific subjects and grade levels.
Customization help: Keep chatting with Luna to request modifications, clarify intent, or simplify the outputs to make sure the content meets your unique needs. Any changes made with Luna are reflected live in your activity, and you can preview the student view instantly. But don’t worry, if you’d rather customize an activity yourself, you can still do that, too!
Seamless building and distribution: Luna builds and edits activities that you can save to your library and distribute to students, just like you can do yourself. And you’ll still see the real-time student responses for in-the-moment support.
Activity editing: By editing activities with Luna, teachers can enhance existing materials, and apply changes to multiple items at once. Edit with Luna allows teachers to add answer choices, update question settings in bulk, add a new tone to an activity, create in a new language, etc.
Changing question types: Luna can change the question type for an existing item in the formative editor. For example, users can ask Luna to change a "Multiple Choice" question to a "Short Answer" question. A confirmation prompt will appear before making the change, as this action may result in the loss of student response data for that particular question, ensuring users are aware of the impact.
Customers with a Balanced Assessment by Formative subscription can also chat with Luna to generate Next Steps - follow up formatives and practice sets, based on students' performance on an assignment. They also have access to Luna Configuration Studio.
Limitations
Luna can have human-like conversations with teachers and quickly answer questions or assist users with building lessons and assignments.
Despite its impressive abilities, there are a few significant constraints to Luna. Below, we’ll detail some of the most common limitations.
Technical and Functional Constraints
Overly verbose/repetitive: ChatGPT, which Luna is based upon, has challenges generating long-form structured content. Although you can have it write to a specific word count, the responses will often repeat earlier points unless told not to. The generative AI model struggles with structure and format, sometimes giving list-type points.
Sensitivity to prompts: The output is heavily dependent on how the question is asked; minor rephrasing can lead to drastically different results.
Inability to run code: While it can generate code, it cannot execute it to test for bugs or confirm functionality
Contextual and Cognitive Limitations
Lack of genuine understanding: It doesn't "understand" opics; it predicts the next likely words based on patterns in training data, which can lead to superficial or nonsensical responses.
Poor handling of nuance/context: It often struggles with sarcasm, irony, idioms, or subtle cultural cues, often interpreting queries too literally.
Short-term memory limits: while it can follow a conversation, it has a limited 'context window', meaning it may forget information from earlier in a long conversation.
Can’t Ask Clarifying Questions
Luna can’t seek clarifications for ambiguous queries. It will often guess the most probable response based on the provided context if the input is unclear. That said, if necessary, you can invite Luna to ask for clarification in the initial prompt.
Here’s an example of how to include a clarifying question in your prompt:
“Act as an experienced 8th-grade social studies teacher. I am drafting a lesson plan on the Industrial Revolution. Please review my outline and ask clarifying questions about how I can make this more interactive and accessible for ELL students before finalizing the lesson”
Factual Inaccuracy and "Hallucinations"
Fabrication of information: Can generate false information, including made up quotes, citations, and data points, presenting them confidently as fact.
Errors in Reasoning/Math: Despite constant improvements, it can struggle with complex logic, multi-step word problems, and basic arithmetic.
Lack of real-time information: The core model is trained on a dataset with a specific cutoff, meaning it may not know about very recent events.
It is always important to fact-check responses given by Luna to ensure accuracy.
Optimize Luna's Output
To optimize Luna's output, you can format your prompts by following these guidelines:
Clearly Define Your Goal
State the Subject & Grade Level: Specify what subject and grade level you're teaching.
Describe the Topic: Provide a clear, concise topic or concept.
Specify the Learning Objective: Explain what you want students to learn or achieve.
Focus on the Teaching Goal
Avoid Question Structure: Focus on content, not how questions are formatted.
No Specific Length Requirements: Concentrate on the topic, not how long the assessment should be.
Example Prompt
"I'm teaching 6th grade science, focusing on ecosystems. I want students to understand the food chain. How can we assess their understanding?"
By using a detailed and focused prompt, you'll help Luna generate useful and targeted assessments.
Supported Questions and Content
The live AI assistant can generate the following question types and content items:
Multiple Choice
Multiple Selection
Short Answer
Free Response
True or False
Show Your Work
Audio Response
Categorize
Matching
Resequence
Categorize
Matching
Numeric
Text Content (for reading passages or information)
Answer Choice Explanations
Hints
Additional question types can be generated using other AI-supported features - learn more about those HERE
Item Bank (School & District Add-on)
Teachers - who are members of a licensed organization with the Item Bank Add-on -
can ask the AI Assistant (Luna) to find and add existing questions from the Item Bank. The AI supports searching by standards, handles passages with associated child questions, and supports filtering by Depth of Knowledge (DOK). This allows educators to quickly assemble Formatives using high-quality, pre-existing content alongside AI-generated materials
Prompt factory: Get started with Luna
Want to try out Luna for yourself, but aren’t sure where to start? Use or adapt one of these prompts to get the creativity going!
General back-to-school prompts
Need to start the year with some icebreakers or an activity to learn more about your new students? Try these prompts:
Give me five open-ended questions for a “Getting To Know You” activity that will help me understand my students’ interests.
Can you create a three-question poll for students to gauge their feelings about starting a new school year?
Design a short writing prompt that asks students to share one goal they have for the upcoming school year and why it’s important to them.
Can you make me a “Two Truths and a Lie” template about hobbies and interests where students can share information about themselves and have us guess what’s true and what isn’t?
ELA prompts
Looking for a fun ELA activity to get students learning right away? Luna can help! Try prompts like:
Create a five-question multiple-choice quiz on identifying the main idea and supporting details in the paragraph I supply.
Can you make me a drag-and-drop activity where students match literary devices to their definitions or examples?
Hey Luna, set up a short writing prompt that asks students to analyze the author’s purpose in the informational text I provide.
Let’s make a sentence completion activity for irregular verbs.
Social studies prompts
Help students get in the groove from day one with engaging social studies activities, powered by Luna! Try prompts like:
Develop a categorization activity that asks students to sort historical events into chronological order.
Can you design a quick quiz on the U.S. branches of government?
Make me a fill-in-the-blank activity where students must list the causes of the American Revolution.
Luna, let’s make a short matching activity that asks students to pair important people from ancient civilizations with their key contributions to society.
Science prompts
Get your students thinking like scientists from the first bell with prompts for Luna, like:
Make a “label the diagram” activity that asks students to name the parts of a plant.
Can you design a 10-question multiple-choice quiz on the states of matter?
I need a drawing and labeling activity about the water cycle.
Write me four true or false questions about the process of photosynthesis.
Share your best prompts
Our team is excited to see what you and Luna can do together this school year. And we bet other teachers would love to learn from you, too. Share your favorite Luna prompts or tips with our community.