More AI maths diagrams, and why it matters more than I thought

The AI Diagram generation party continues in the Barton household

Quick version: I have spent another week pushing AI to make maths diagrams (not that I am addicted, or anything). Cumulative frequency diagrams. Box plots. Histograms. Transformations. Plans and Elevations. Graph plotting. And — the one I never thought I would see — circle theorems. All of these can be found, for free, on the Topics Index Page on Mr Barton Maths.

If you want to know why I think this matters, read on below!

Another week, another load of diagram-heavy maths resources created. I started with the full suite of statistical diagrams I was missing, dabbled in some geometry topics, treated myself to a bit of graph plotting, and then I had a proper go at the big one: circle theorems, which felt like the holy grail because of the complexity of the diagrams.

Here is a flavour of the fruits of my labour.

A full suite of carrying out and describing transformations:

Drawing and Interpreting Box Plots:

Plotting straight lines and quadratic graphs:

And, in what I am calling the greatest achievement of my life to date, a full suite of Circle Theorem resources.

I’ve built each resource to perfectly render as a worksheet as well:

Now, you could look at all that and reasonably ask: so what?

Maths, of all subjects, is the one with the most high-quality, freely available resources. Textbooks. PowerPoints. Worksheets. Whole websites that have been serving teachers for decades. Why do we need another bundle?

Two reasons. And I think both matter.

1. These resources are not static

Take a worksheet with 10 questions on angles in a triangle. Your class smashes through them. Five students need more practice. What do you do? Hunt for another worksheet? Make one up on the board? Move on and hope?

With AI-generated content, you can just generate more. 5 more, 20 more, 40 more. Same topic, same difficulty, or scaled up. Complete with answers and working out, Click.

But the quantity is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is the ability to combine.

Here is what I mean. This is a screenshot of the top of my circle theorems page:

You can pick the exact theorems you want students to practise. Imagine that you have just taught the angle at the centre and angles in the same segment. Students have practised each skill in isolation, but now they need to get good at switching between the two. Tick those two boxes. Generate as many questions as you want. Then, once you have taught the next theorem, add it in. Then the next one.

This allows you to provide students with focused practise on any individual skill, as well as interleaved practise, ensuring they have the opportunity to develop the all-important skill of discrimination, which research suggests is crucial.

That is what is new. Not the volume of questions. The fact that the mix is in the teacher’s hands.

2. It opens the door to resource types I could not build before

My Shedloads of Practice resources are designed to do one thing: consolidate. Drill the skill, secure the procedure, practise switching, get the reps in. That is useful. But it is not the only thing students need.

So, I have started experimenting with a new resource type called Variation 6. It leans on the work I have been doing for the last seven years on variationtheory.com.

The structure is constrained: six questions only. Each one draws students’ attention to something specific. What changes between questions? What stays the same? How far can we push the concept? What happens if we reverse?

Here is one I built earlier for my 7-year old, on adding a single-digit number crossing the 10 boundary:

But because AI's ability to create high-quality diagrams has increased, this opens the door to doing more complex diagram-heavy topics such as this

My next project is to build a lot more Variation 6 resources, including for topics that were locked off when AI could not draw well. I am yet to break this news to my wife.

Building Variation 6 resources is not easy. It is not enough to write the prompt, click a button, go and make a brew, and come back to a finished resource. Variation 6 has been a proper back-and-forth with Claude. I sit there, sketch the structure, push back when a question or sequence isn't doing what I want, ask for tweaks, swap things in and out. I am using Claude as a thought partner, not a printing press. And I’m having a great time doing it.

I will write more about that process in a future post, sharing some of the back-and-forths I’m having, including examples where Claude does something daft, and when I do something daft and how Claude massively improves it, because I think it matters. The output is only as good as the conversation you have to get there.

In the meantime, the best place to find all the latest resources I’m working on, mapped to individual topics, is on my Topics Index page.

Pulling it together

So why does this development in AI’s ability to draw matter? Not because we are short of maths resources. We are not.

It matters because we can now produce diagrams in the quantities and combinations that an individual class needs at any given moment. And it matters because it unlocks a category of resource — variation-led, attention-shaping — that we just could not build with AI before.

Both of these will land or fall on what teachers actually do with them. So I am genuinely keen to hear: if you have had a go at any of this, what have you been making? What is working? What is not?

Let me know in the comments.

Thanks so much for reading.

Craig