Personal Math Tutor

Difficulty: Beginner
Time: 30 minutes
Learning Focus: Basic agent interaction, calculator tools
Module: agent

Overview

Create a math tutor agent that helps solve arithmetic problems and explains the steps involved.

⚙️ Small local models have limits. This project chains several reasoning or tool-use steps. Small models (the kind you often run locally on Ollama) can be unreliable at multi-step reasoning: expect occasional wrong turns or dropped steps. If results are poor, try a larger/more capable model. Note that the library routes small models to JSON tool-calling rather than the ReAct format.

Instructions

1. Start the agent in interactive mode using hands-on-ai agent interactive
2. Ask the agent to solve basic math problems like "What is 24 × 7?" or "Calculate 125 ÷ 5"
3. For each problem, ask the agent to explain its reasoning step by step
4. Try more complex problems like "If I have 3 boxes with 12 items each, and I add 7 more items, how many do I have total?"
5. Observe how the agent uses the calculator tools to solve these problems
6. Create a list of 5 progressively harder math problems that demonstrate the agent's capabilities

Extension Ideas

• Ask the agent to solve algebraic equations like "If 2x + 7 = 15, what is x?"
• Challenge the agent with word problems that require multiple calculation steps
• Compare the agent's approach with how you would solve the same problems