By By Deba Uwadiae and Okon Ekpenyong
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has unveiled Lifetown Columbus’ new AI Educational Hologram Super Buddy at Lifetown Columbus, Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center.
Lifetown Columbus is a 5,000-square-foot simulated village where students with special needs practice key life, social, and job skills. The Super Buddy will allow students to tell the AI hologram about what they’ve learned, helping cement their understanding through “mirror learning.”
Miami University, which clinically tested the AI with Whitehall City Schools’ fifth-grade students, found that Super Buddy increased students’ cognitive engagement with the material presented to them and increased students’ likelihood of voluntarily continuing to learn.
“LifeTown’s Super Buddy is a true innovation with the potential to help thousands of children learn in a new way,” said Gov. DeWine.
“For 18 years we have watched children come into LifeTown and practice being independent — opening an account, filling a prescription, buying groceries,” said Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann, executive director of LifeTown Columbus and Chabad Columbus.
“What Super Buddy adds is the moment right after, when a child turns around and explains it to someone else. By asking children to explain what they have learned in their own words, Super Buddy reinforces learning while empowering them with an important message: Your voice matters, your knowledge has value, and you have something to teach. In the process, children build self-worth, confidence and resilience.”
For Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, children and youth mental health have been priorities across his two terms, and he has been a longtime supporter of LifeTown.
“Watching students confidently explain a lesson to the SuperBuddy tells you everything about why this program matters.”
The character students talk with is named Mia. She appears as a life-size figure inside a three-dimensional display and speaks with students out loud. After a student works through a real-world lesson at one of the storefronts in LifeTown’s 5,000-square-foot simulated village, Mia starts a conversation and asks for help with something closely related to what the student just covered. The student explains it back to her.
LifeTown calls the approach mirror learning. It is grounded in a well-documented effect in education research known as the protégé effect or learning by teaching: A student who has to explain a concept to someone else processes it more deeply than a student who only receives it. LifeTown’s addition is the delivery — an AI companion that asks for help in a deliberately leading way, so the knowledge a student picked up minutes earlier is what surfaces.
Super Buddy is now in a pilot phase at LifeTown, where roughly 70 students a day from central Ohio school districts work with Mia as part of their visit. Whitehall City Schools students are among the first, as part of an ongoing curriculum enhancement in the district.
“Our fifth graders were among the first to try this, and what struck our teachers was that students kept going after the work was finished. Engagement is the hardest thing to manufacture in a lesson, and these students chose more of it. That tells us something about what our kids will do when they are treated as capable,” said Dr. Sharee Wells, superintendent of Whitehall City Schools.”
Super Buddy is built using a commercially available hologram display unit from Proto, a company whose products are often used for exhibitions and product launches. The substantive work, according to Jonathan Sagir, an AI strategist and LifeTown’s independent technical advisor, was on the conversational side.
LifeTown’s staff and volunteers had spent years teaching children as friends, not lecturers. Sagir’s team took that mirror learning method and turned it inside out for the machine: the child does the teaching, and the super buddy asks for help, giving the human full agency rather than the AI. From first prototype to Miami University’s randomized trial of the method took 12 months.
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