When a note from his 12-year-old daughter’s teacher flagged that she was falling behind in maths, Phil Birchenall did what any parent would do: he sat down at the kitchen table to help. It went badly. The problem wasn’t Daisy. It was the curriculum. Phil stared at the textbook and realized the methods for multiplying fractions and long division had changed so much since 1986 that he was useless. “I could see the color washing from her face, thinking this is not helping me one bit,” he recalls.
Phil isn’t the type to give up. An early adopter who’d already used ChatGPT at work for finances and fitness tools, he built a custom GPT specifically to tutor Daisy. Then came the stroke of genius that changed everything—he gave it the personality of Izzy, the family dog. “Why the heck couldn’t this AI maths tutor not do dog jokes?” he asks. The first session opened with a terrible canine pun, then launched straight into dog-biscuit-themed long division problems. Daisy was hooked.
The results were undeniable. Daisy crushed her SATs maths exam, received a certificate from her teacher acknowledging her dramatic improvement, and placed well into her next school. What Phil created wasn’t just effective—it was fun. The AI felt like an extension of the family pet, transforming a subject that had caused anxiety into something Daisy genuinely wanted to engage with. Phil has since shared the idea on social media, encouraging other parents to build personalized GPTs for their kids. The real Izzy, for her part, remains entirely indifferent to fractions.
