Good morning! This is まさきん.
We’re past the halfway mark of summer vacation, which means our household’s annual battle with jiyu kenkyu, Japan’s summer independent-study assignment for elementary and middle school kids, is officially underway.
With four kids, that means four separate projects running at once. Since they’re all in different grades, just finding topics used to eat up a huge amount of time every year. This year, I decided to try a different approach.
Every Year, I’d Burn Out Just Finding Topics
Honestly, coming up with jiyu kenkyu topics has always been something I dread. A whole day would disappear flipping through encyclopedias or trying to remember what we did last year.
Asking the kids “Is there anything you want to look into?” rarely gets a quick answer. It usually ends with me rattling off a bunch of candidate ideas myself.
When I get stuck on a planning problem at work, I start by reorganizing the information in front of me. I figured the same approach might work for jiyu kenkyu too.
Trying Out Gakken Kids Net’s New AI Service
While searching around, I came across a service Gakken Kids Net launched in July, a feature they call the “Jiyu Kenkyu AI Helper Search.”
It works through a chat interface: you tell it what your child is interested in, and it suggests topics. Apparently there are more than 500 topics in its database, covering everything from experiments and observation to craft projects and research reports.
You can narrow things down by grade level, category, or how much time you have. It even includes trendy topics like the SDGs and space.
Beyond just suggesting topics, it also offers tips on how to present the findings, right down to sample poster-board layouts and how to lay out photos. That was a huge help, since in past years we always got stuck at the write-up stage.
When it comes to picking out learning tools, my rule is to try them myself first. When I compared electronic dictionaries a while back, I found it was faster to judge things with my own eyes than to rely on reviews. So I took the same approach this time.
How It Went for Each of the Four Kids
For my oldest, I had them start the conversation with their favorite school subject. As the back-and-forth continued, they narrowed the topic down on their own. Since they like science, they landed on a comparison experiment using everyday food ingredients.
My youngest isn’t great at long conversations yet, so I sat next to them and relayed the questions myself. Even so, we got to a topic far faster than we would have by flipping through encyclopedias alone. They ended up settling on observing how ice melts differently depending on where it’s placed.
One fun moment was when two of the siblings’ topics started to overlap. When I told the AI “we’d like a different angle,” it immediately offered up other options. Being able to ask again without hesitation, in a way you might feel awkward doing with another person, turned out to be a quietly useful feature.
With four kids, gathering materials once the topics are settled is its own project. So I consolidated everything into a single shopping list and did one big run on a day off. It ends up taking a lot less time and effort than buying things piecemeal.
What Worked Well, and What I Watched Out For
Cutting down the time spent hunting for topics was, honestly, a huge relief. We could put that freed-up time toward the actual experiments and craft work instead.
That said, I avoided just handing over whatever topic the AI suggested and calling it done. I made sure each kid explained, in their own words, why that particular topic was interesting. Leaving the write-up entirely to the AI as well felt like it would defeat the whole point of jiyu kenkyu.
I was also careful about personal information. We never entered names or school names, sticking only to interests and favorite subjects.
Screen time creeping up was another thing that genuinely worried me. So we limited the AI conversation strictly to the initial topic search. The actual experiments, observations, and write-up work all happen away from the screen.
Turning Progress Check-Ins Into Dinner Table Conversation
Settling on a topic doesn’t mean jiyu kenkyu is finished. The experiments and observations continue throughout the entire summer break.
So once a week, I make a point of asking about progress over dinner. A light question like “what did you measure today?” is enough. It also doubles as practice for the kids explaining things in their own words, which feels like a nice two-for-one.
Running four projects at once means some kids inevitably lose steam partway through. When that happens, I let them hear how their siblings are progressing. Whether it’s rivalry or something else, that alone has been enough to get a stalled kid moving again.
Data Usage Quietly Crept Up
With more research going into jiyu kenkyu, the time spent searching on tablets went up too. We ended up watching a lot of how-to videos, and our data usage climbed more than I expected.
We’d previously gone through and consolidated our kids’ phone lines. Thanks to that, I was able to check our data usage more closely than usual throughout summer break. It was one of those moments where I was glad we’d set things up so we could see the whole family’s lines at a glance.
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Being able to temporarily bump up a plan only when you’re about to run out of data brings real peace of mind. I also just don’t want data worries getting in the way of my kids’ learning time.
What I Took Away From This
I’d always thought finding a topic was the biggest hurdle in jiyu kenkyu. Just getting some help from AI on that one step made things noticeably easier for both the kids and me.
That said, the hands-on work is still ultimately the kids’ own job. I think treating AI as just a tool for sparking ideas, and keeping that distance, is about the right balance.
The habit of researching before deciding isn’t limited to jiyu kenkyu. In our house, we take the same approach to reviewing our monthly fixed costs, and checking our phone bills is one part of that.
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