# Socratic Tutor Agent

> A tutoring agent that guides learners with questions and hints instead of giving answers — supports academic integrity, stays accurate, and escalates to a teacher.

- **Category:** Education & Tutoring
- **Difficulty:** Intermediate
- **Setup time:** 40 min
- **Stacks:** Claude, LangGraph, OpenAI
- **Version:** 2.0.0 (updated 2026-06-21)
- **Source:** https://agent-kits.com/kit/socratic-tutor

## Overview

Guides learning through questions, hints, and scaffolding — building understanding, not just supplying answers.

Diagnoses the learner's level and adapts the explanation and difficulty accordingly.

Supports academic integrity: it coaches the method on graded work instead of completing it.

Defensive: never fabricates facts, keeps content accurate and age-appropriate, and escalates to a human teacher when needed.

## When to use it

- You want a tutor that builds understanding, not a homework-answering machine.
- Learners benefit from guided questioning, hints, and worked analogies.
- You need accurate, age-appropriate help that adapts to the student's level.
- You want academic-integrity guardrails and escalation to a human teacher built in.

## When not to use it

- You want it to simply produce answers to graded assignments — it won't.
- You need authoritative assessment or grading (that's a teacher's role).
- The subject requires professional (medical, legal, mental-health) guidance.
- You can't provide appropriate supervision and privacy for minors.

## Architecture

- **Learner intake** — Receives the topic or problem and the learner's message, gauging their current understanding from what they say.
- **Level assessment** — Estimates the learner's level so explanations, vocabulary, and difficulty are pitched appropriately.
- **Integrity classifier** — Detects when a request is to complete graded/assessed work and switches to scaffolding instead of supplying the answer.
- **Socratic response engine** — Chooses the smallest helpful intervention — a guiding question, a hint, an analogy, or a parallel worked example — to move learning forward.
- **Accuracy guard** — Checks teaching content for correctness and surfaces uncertainty rather than fabricating facts, formulas, or citations.
- **Understanding check** — Verifies the learner actually followed before advancing, adapting if they're still stuck.
- **Safety & escalation** — Keeps content age-appropriate and routes distress or out-of-scope topics to a human teacher or trusted adult.

## Files in this bundle

- `system-prompt.md` — the agent's system prompt
- `tools.json` — tool/function definitions the agent expects
- `workflow.md` — step-by-step run loop
- `.env.example` — environment variables to fill in
- `kit.json` — full structured metadata
- `starters/` — minimal starter snippets
- `LICENSE` — Apache-2.0 (code, configuration, and schema)
- `LICENSE-CONTENT` — CC BY 4.0 (specification text and documentation)
- `NOTICE` — attribution and trademark notice
- `run.py` — **runnable demo**: real agent loop with mock tools (`pip install anthropic`, set `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`, `python run.py`)
- `agentaz.json` / `agentaz.schema.json` — AgentAz™ governance spec + schema

## Implementation notes

- Enforce the academic-integrity rule structurally: detect graded-work requests and switch to scaffolding, because a tutor that completes assignments actively harms the learner and the institution.
- Prefer the smallest effective intervention (question before hint before answer); revealing the full solution too early short-circuits learning.
- Never fabricate facts, formulas, or citations — admit uncertainty and guide verification, since a confident wrong fact taught to a learner is worse than 'let's check.'
- Keep all content age-appropriate and assume a learner may be a minor; avoid soliciting unnecessary personal data.
- Escalate distress, safety, or out-of-scope topics to a human teacher or trusted adult — a subject tutor must not act as a counselor.
- Give honest, specific encouragement tied to real progress rather than empty praise, which learners see through and which distorts self-assessment.
- Diagnosing misconceptions and integrity judgment is what the strong model is for; a cheaper model can handle routine hints.

## Variations

- **Basic — Guided-question tutor:** Helps with a topic via guiding questions and hints, adapting to the learner, without completing graded work. Single-subject.
- **Advanced — Scaffolded tutor with integrity:** Adds level assessment, the full intervention ladder, accuracy/uncertainty guards, age-appropriate safety, and escalation to a human teacher.
- **Enterprise — LMS-integrated tutoring:** Adds multi-subject support, LMS integration, teacher dashboards and flags, progress tracking, and institution-level safety and privacy controls for minors.

## FAQ

**Will it just do my homework?**

No. If you ask it to complete graded or assessed work, it switches to coaching — explaining the method and working a similar example — so you can produce your own answer. It helps you learn rather than handing over something to submit.

**How is it different from just asking a chatbot?**

It leads with diagnosing what you know and gives the smallest hint or question that unblocks you, rather than dumping a full answer. The goal is understanding you keep, not a one-off solution.

**What if it doesn't know something?**

It admits uncertainty and helps you verify from a reliable source rather than inventing a fact, formula, or citation — because a confident wrong answer taught as truth is worse than checking together.

**Is it safe for kids?**

It keeps content accurate and age-appropriate, avoids harmful or distressing material, minimizes personal-data collection, and is designed to be used with appropriate supervision for minors.

**What if a student is struggling emotionally?**

It stays in its lane as a subject tutor: it responds with warmth but encourages the student to talk to a teacher, counselor, or trusted adult, and flags the situation for a human rather than acting as a counselor.

**Does it adapt to different levels?**

Yes. It estimates the learner's level from their responses and adjusts vocabulary, pace, and difficulty, giving honest, specific encouragement tied to real progress.


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© 2026 AgentKits · www.agent-kits.com

**Open source.** Code, configuration, and the AgentAz™ schema are licensed under
**Apache-2.0**; specification text and documentation under **CC BY 4.0** (with
attribution to AgentKits, link to https://www.agent-kits.com). See LICENSE, LICENSE-CONTENT,
and NOTICE in this bundle. "AgentAz" and "AgentKits" are trademarks of AgentKits.

**Flagship reference blueprint.** View the source, AgentAz™ spec, and frozen v1.0 schema
in the public registry: https://github.com/agent-kits/agentaz
Original: https://agent-kits.com/kit/socratic-tutor
