One perks of Angie Adams’ work at Samsung is seeing each year some of the nation’s most talented emerging scientists tackle difficult problems in creative ways.
They are working on an AI tool that can recognize signs of panic attacks near a child on the autism spectrum in one case, and are thinking of ways to effectively use drones to combat wildfires in another case.
What is noteworthy about these innovations is that most creators are not old enough to license drivers. They are part of Samsung’s solution for tomorrow’s technology competition for public middle and high school students, and the victory means a big prize for schools to buy more technical tools.
While the annual finalist harvest is impressive, Adams says the program organizers have noticed something different about this year’s Brainy Student Engineers cohort.
Of the top 50 teams, 42% used artificial intelligence to promote their inventions. That’s only 6% in 2024.
In Adams’ view, that’s good. Because she is confident that today’s K-12 students will use AI in some way when they ultimately join the workforce.
Adams, senior manager at Samsung’s Corporate Citizenship, talks about the proportion of students who will use AI in future. “I really believe that it’s something that starts in the classroom, so I want to do my part in ensuring students have the skills to understand, use and create this new technology.”
At the classroom level, teachers are on the same page.
With the above investigation 1,000 public school teachers – It was done through Donorschoose’s Samsung partner – a whopping 96% say that AI will “be an essential part of education within the next 10 years.” As many have said, they currently lack the resources to integrate artificial intelligence into their curriculum.
Educators are generally optimistic about the use of AI in classrooms, with over half saying they already use it, and another 33% say they are exploring ways to integrate it. The most common uses of reported AI teachers were to personalize student learning, interactive learning tools and gain insight into student performance through data analysis.
Their most common concerns about AI were plagiarism, lack of teacher training on AI teaching tools, the possibility of spreading false information, and reduced student interactions during class.
Few teachers were worried about losing their jobs to AI, but only 5% were worried.
Adams predicts that students will use AI in their careers, and as teachers experiment with classroom use, more districts are moving to formalize AI in their curriculum.
Zarek Drozda, director of non-profit data science, says his organization is interested in providing an increase in AI and data science coursework across school districts. The concept of data science forms the components of artificial intelligence, including popular large-scale language models such as ChatGpt.
“We’ve seen the rapid growth of state pilots, the state-supported professional development programs, and standard revisions,” Drozda says.[and] The data science, data literacy and AI literacy curriculum market is growing very rapidly. We have a lot of interest from school leaders. ”
He says the appeal of data science is that it offers a concrete on-ramp for students to learn about artificial intelligence.
“I think Data Science provides a very compelling framework for students to evaluate skeptical AI tools and to gain a deeper understanding of use cases,” says Drozda. “ChatGpt is trained in textual data. For example, it’s really good for writing that’s not that good for mathematics.”
Drozda says schools don’t necessarily need to build AI classes or programs. You can start by mastering spreadsheets, coding languages like Python, or teaching students to use AI chatbots.
“School leaders should not think that they have to do everything at once, and it’s perfectly fine to take small entry-level steps to start preparing everyone for the wider tech landscape,” Drozda said. “I think this is through bite-sized modules, in particular, how the movement of data science and data literacy is approaching this. Try two weeks with mathematics concepts. Covering existing units already in the biology ecosystem, tell us about the economics boom and bust through data from the Federal Reserve.”
The district doesn’t just think of AI as part of its education. They explore how it can help a wide range of jobs.
Pete is free Generated AI Project Consortium Director of School Networking, a professional association of K-12 Edtech Leaders. The organization has developed a set of guidelines to help districts think through artificial intelligence use and policies.
The lifecycle of teachers’ feelings about AI begins with confusion, followed by a desire to know how technology can be useful in lesson planning and other administrative tasks, not just fearing it will threaten the job.
“Even if something new happens, that’s the first attitude,” he says of the teacher’s early skepticism.
Generated AI has the potential to help districts operate more efficiently, from managing spreadsheets to bus schedules.
“Now we can do more things that can help our families and students than we have in the past,” he simply says. “When students reach chronic absenteeism, they connect it to the student absences and database, and create connections with parents and provide daily updates. [whether] Whether their students were here or not, they have no need to make a call, so that communication window is very short. ”
However, the district also says that the “fast move, break” spirit of Silicon Valley culture behind AI development is not a school’s legal obligation to protect student data.
Beyond the possibilities of artificial intelligence that make the management process smoother, there are many logistic and ethical considerations that districts have to do when it comes to injecting AI into their curriculum.
He explains that the foundations of AI education must be rooted in critical thinking, and how to ask good questions and evaluate answers.
“You look at the results and say, ‘It’s not even consistent with the reality of what I know about this historical event,'” Just says. “It’s important because sometimes you can hallucinate and say it makes sense or doesn’t make sense.”
Ultimately, I’m not a fan of making artificial intelligence a unique standalone class. Instead, he believes it is something that needs to be integrated into all classes, so students can learn how to apply it to each field.
“The simplest thing to do is develop a class. Just the school board approves it and you can do that in a month and a half,” Just says. “What you really see is fundamentally changing the way you teach things. It’s really hard so no one wants to hear it.”
This kind of AI integration is at a level of complexity he has recognized and is unattractive to most districts. This is the process that will lead to years of training teachers to integrate AI into the curriculum.
“If you’re not working hard on it, you’ll fall behind and you’re not serving your students well,” he said, “In three or five years, all businesses will expect it. Even today, many companies expect high school students to have the skills to use these tools in the workplace.”
