A new education company, Hedgehog Education, looks to curb the trend of students offloading their homework to generative AI by making its exercise software available to several schools around the country.
Earlier this month, Hedgehog Education celebrated its official launch event in which it published the results of a pilot study that showed that its AI-powered educational software made a very positive impact on a sample of Year 9 physics students.
Since generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, emerged onto the global scene a few years ago, it has transformed many aspects of everyday life. One major example is the way students go about their homework.
Speaking to one of Hedgehog Education's three co-founders, Mikea Dimech, this newsroom delved into what this new education company is offering, its successful trial in recent months, its blossoming partnerships with local schools, and what this could all mean for local education in this modern age.
Dimech shared how the idea behind Hedgehog Education unfolded after one of its co-founders, Miguel Micallef, noticed that students were returning to class with perfect homework answers, yet struggled significantly to answer the same questions once they were challenged in class. Micallef, a physics O-Level teacher, quickly realised that "whenever faced with a struggle, these students are increasingly turning towards ChatGPT to hand them the answers straight away".
Dimech stated that "this bypasses the learning process completely" and that "the general-purpose nature of these tools and their ease of use is making them the default 'go-to' whenever they have a difficult question".
"This is the problem we are trying to solve, and it inspired us to come together to build a solution because, ultimately, what is the cost when the entire generation of students is offloading its thinking to AI?" Dimech told this newsroom.
After discussing the issue among themselves several months ago, 25-year-old founders Mikea Dimech, Miguel Micallef, and Nigel Caruana decided to take action, leading them to establish Hedgehog Education together. Dimech said that the company's main mission is to not only address this problem, but to cultivate critical thinking in students while preserving the human agency of teachers and other educators so that they remain the ones to personalise their students' learning to the level that is required.
How does Hedgehog Education work?
This online platform is currently best described as "an exercise school that teachers use for homework and classwork", Dimech said. It works in three steps.
To use Hedgehog Education's learning platform, the first step is for teachers to upload their notes, past papers, worksheets, and any other existing material so that they may create exercises on the platform according to their specifications. Here, teachers may also tune the accompanying AI's behaviour so it matches their teaching style.
Once a teacher has uploaded their material and customised the platform's supportive AI to their liking, students can log in and complete the exercises devised by teachers.
The important catch is that while completing exercises, students may seek the assistance of Hedgehog Education's AI tutor - however, Dimech said that this AI assistant "is only used when needed". In addition, he said that rather than spoon-feeding students with answers, the AI tutor asks leading questions, following the concept of Socratic tutoring, and "inquiry-based learning" to equip students to reason through problems themselves.
"We built an online platform where we make sure that students are being challenged at the right level for them and they are going through the thinking process themselves, so they are not being spoon-fed the answer," he said.
After students have carried out these exercises, instead of this being followed by manual corrections by their teachers, teachers can view a live dashboard that displays "both the high-level performance of students across the class" as well as each student's performance on an individual level. Through the latter, teachers can see each student's strengths, weaknesses, and other insights to see how they should follow up with their students.
At the moment, this online platform is only enabled to help secondary school students learning the physics O-Level syllabus.
Dimech told this newsroom that after its successful trial with St Martin's College, the software will be expanding its capabilities to assist secondary school students learning biology, chemistry, and potentially even mathematics this scholastic year.
After Hedgehog Education's successful case study with St Martin's College in the third term of this past scholastic year, this nascent company will be partnering with several private and Church schools as of this September. Hedgehog Education is also working with the Directorate for Digital Literacy and Transversal Skills (DLTS) within the Ministry for Education.
Dimech added that "at no point" will this platform supersede teachers' agency in designing assessments and thus be responsible for giving out grades. He noted that the company is "very values-driven" and runs on the belief that teachers' judgement cannot be replaced.
Case study: Only 2.6% of students left questions blank when stuck, compared with 45.7% before the trial
During the final term of the 2025/26 scholastic year that ended this June, Hedgehog Education collaborated with St Martin's College to try out its online platform on secondary school students during their studies. What began as a homework tool was integrated into teachers' classwork as this pilot study was ongoing.
Dimech said that St Martin's College agreed to collaborate in this pilot study because they were facing the same problem that Hedgehog Education co-founder Micallef observed in his own classroom. Hence, they agreed to support this potential solution to "AI being used in an unethical way".
To evaluate the effectiveness of this educational platform, Year 9 physics students at St Martin's College were given a survey to fill out before and after they used the AI-powered software. From the 86 total students, 46 students answered the survey at the start of the pilot study and 39 students filled in the end-of-term survey. The results went as well as both parties could have asked for.
"I was very pleasantly surprised because I did not think it would go this well - neither did the teachers; they were really happy with it," Dimech admitted.
These surveys showed that the number of students turning to ChatGPT or leaving a question blank whenever they got stuck plummeted. Before using Hedgehog Education, around three quarters of students (73.9%) turned to ChatGPT for help; after doing exercises on this platform, this dropped to just 12.8%, which equates to around one in every eight students. At the start of the pilot study, all students, except for one outlier (45 out of 46), admitted to already using AI tools to assist them in their homework, with most opting for ChatGPT. This is despite the fact that, at the beginning of this pilot study, 63% of students agreed with the statement that "AI makes it too easy to get answers without thinking".
Simultaneously, the number of students leaving a question blank nosedived from almost half of the entire cohort (45.7%) to just 2.6% of all students, which rounds down to just two students.
After using this platform, the number of students feeling that their exercises challenged them at "the right level" more than doubled - from less than a quarter of students (23.9%) to over half (56.4%). Dimech attributed this to how the software enabled teachers to personalise their exercises to different students, according to their respective areas of difficulty.
In addition, the number of students who felt "confident and prepared for a test" increased from 30.4% to 69.2% over this pilot study; 71.8% of students felt that they better understood their topic after doing their homework, up from 39.1%.
Arguably the most drastic statistic uncovered from these surveys that was shared with this newsroom was that the percentage of students who claimed to be receiving "useful feedback" on their work shot up by 57.3% over this study - from a meagre 19.6% to 76.9% of the entire cohort of physics students.
Future aim: to expand to post-secondary education
In less than a full year, Hedgehog Education has gone from developing its initial software prototype last December, to fine-tuning it for physics O-Level, to now preparing to collaborate with several schools this upcoming scholastic year and onboard biology, chemistry, and potentially even mathematics.
So, how far can this software expand?
Dimech hopes for his company to eventually expand to assist in intermediate and A-Level subjects.
He noted that it is "very easy" for them to simply add more subjects into Hedgehog Education's capabilities, however, the company is more focused on "keeping the pedagogy element at its core". Hence, he said that "a very methodological approach" is taken whenever a new subject is introduced.
During the company's launch earlier this August, at the HSBC Innovation Hub, the Archdiocese of Malta's AI coordinator, Jean Gové, stated that AI is not creating new issues, but that this technology is unearthing and exacerbating the existing flaws within our education system.
Dimech and his co-founders hope that as their company expands to help more teachers and students, they can work with all stakeholders to address the longstanding issues within the Maltese education sector.
It is hoped that the success of their trial a few months ago will repeat itself as they expand to a greater challenge next month, all while students - such as those within the pilot study who asked for the software to be widened to language subjects - support its uptake and learn to use AI ethically, allowing them to truly start learning again.