OpenAI adds College Planner and flashcards to ChatGPT for Teens

What OpenAI says early usage shows

ChatGPT for Teens is the default experience automatically applied to accounts identified as under 18. According to OpenAI, teens who had access to it sent about 2.7 million more learning-related messages on average than those who did not yet have it, as the product became available to more teens globally.

The company reports that the most selected conversation starters are "ask questions to develop my ideas," "give feedback on my draft," and "help me check my evidence." In one week, nearly 1.2 million teens used Learning Visualizations to understand math and science concepts, and more than 180,000 used Study Mode for step-by-step learning support.

On time spent, OpenAI says teens average under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT, and less than 2% spend more than three consecutive hours. The product includes built-in break reminders, and in almost half of teen conversations with such a reminder, teens took a break or ended the conversation within five minutes. Among teens with sessions longer than three consecutive hours, over 80% had at least one prompt related to learning. OpenAI contrasts this with a publicly reported average of 5 hours for teen social media usage, and calls the early signs encouraging.

College Planner and support for advisers

OpenAI says hundreds of thousands of US teens use ChatGPT each week to plan for college, including tracking deadlines, researching schools and understanding financial aid. In response, it will soon add College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens.

The tool brings application requirements, deadlines, tasks and financial-aid steps for the schools on a student's list into one plan. Students can return to update progress, use the timeline to plan ahead and ask ChatGPT questions, from what a requirement means to how to get started. It also helps with understanding financial aid requirements, tracking each school's aid deadlines, and exploring scholarships and fee waivers. OpenAI says it is designed to handle the practical steps without taking over the personal work of deciding where to apply.

The initial US version targets high-school students in grades 10 to 12 who plan to attend a four-year college. OpenAI plans to extend it to more countries and, over time, to two-year colleges, technical colleges and trade schools.

OpenAI is also supporting College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that places recent college graduates as advisers in under-resourced high schools. The contribution will help the organization expand into new states and create an AI fellowship program, in which advisers will test and share practical ways to use AI to help students reach college.

Teen advisory council at Boston Children's Hospital

OpenAI will support Boston Children's Hospital's Digital Wellness Lab and its independent Student Advisory Council over the next three years. For the 2026-27 school year, the Lab will bring together about 22 students in two tracks: about 12 students aged 14 to 18 working on digital wellbeing projects in their communities, and about 10 students aged 16 to 20 focused on building AI chatbots and emerging technology.

Students in the AI track will test tools and recommend changes based on how they use AI in learning and personal life. OpenAI expects to seek feedback on teen safety defaults, parental controls and notifications, and AI literacy. The company says it aims to bring the recommendations into product and model decisions early and to report back to students on what it changes and why.

Flashcards, quizzes and multi-photo capture

OpenAI says students told it that photographing and uploading notes can take hours. A new continuous, multi-photo capture feature lets students photograph several pages and combine them automatically into a single PDF ready to upload. It is available on iOS, and OpenAI says it is working to bring it to Android.

ChatGPT can now turn uploaded notes or a chosen topic into flashcards. Students can mark cards they know, return to missed ones or shuffle the deck. Decks are saved in the teen's Library, and students can ask ChatGPT to pull up the flashcards and create a scheduled task to practice them. Quizzes are also easier to create: students can turn notes into interactive quizzes, and ChatGPT is better at recognizing when a user wants a quiz and creating it directly in chat.

OpenAI says it will keep learning from teens, families and educators, check how protections work in practice and share what it learns as ChatGPT for Teens evolves.