Creating a customisable Socratic AI physics tutor

This paper explores role engineering as an effective paradigm for customizing large language models into specialized AI tutors for physics education. We demonstrate this methodology by designing a Socratic physics problem-solving tutor using Google’s Gemini Gems feature, defining its pedagogical behaviour through a detailed ‘script’ that specifies its role and persona. We present two illustrative use cases: the first demonstrates the Gem’s multimodal ability to analyse a student’s hand-drawn force diagram and apply notational rules from a ‘Knowledge’ file; the second showcases its capacity to guide conceptual reasoning in electromagnetism using its pre-trained knowledge without using specific documents provided by the instructor. Our findings show that the ‘role-engineered’ Gem facilitates a Socratic dialogue, in stark contrast to a standard Gemini model, which tends to immediately provide direct solutions. We conclude that role engineering is a pivotal and accessible method for educators to transform a general-purpose ‘solution provider’ into a reliable pedagogical tutor capable of engaging students in an active reflection process. This approach offers a powerful tool for both instructors and students, while also highlighting the importance of addressing the technology’s inherent limitations, such as the potential for occasional inaccuracies.