Members of the Penn State Berks information technology faculty collaborated with teachers and students at Wyomissing Area High School to create projects for the Presidential AI Challenge, which seeks seeks to inspire young people and educators to create artificial intelligence (AI)-based innovative solutions to community challenges while fostering AI interest and competency. In total, six teams competed in the challenge, with one team moving forward to the regional stage. All teams also showcased their work at two professional conferences.
The collaboration was made possible through a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, titled "Enhancing Critical Thinking in Introductory Programming Through Artificial Intelligence and Socratic Metacognitive Inquiry-Based Learning Environment," that included supplemental funding to support K-12 artificial intelligence teams for the challenge. Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, is the lead on the grant.
"Our role at the University is to put together a K-12 team - four student teams and two teacher teams," he said. "The teams had to propose a solution to one of the problems on the Presidential AI Challenge website by creating a video and prototype."
Penn State Berks faculty held two on-campus workshops for the participating teams and offered a lot of offline support, Konak said. Boosting students' critical thinking skills in the age of AI was a key focus of the initiative.
"Our goal was to teach teachers how this can be a good tool to use without hurting students' critical thinking," Konak said. "We did a lot of research to facilitate that."
The teacher team of Curt Minich, AP computer science teacher at Wyomissing Area High School and adjunct computer science faculty member at Penn State Berks, and Chris Killinger, biology teacher at Wyomissing Area High School, were selected to advance to the regional level with their project, "BioBuddy: Designing AI to coach student thinking, not replace it," in the Presidential AI Challenge.
All six teams - including the four student teams - shared their work at the professional level through presentations at two different conferences: the 16th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference at Princeton University on March 14, and the ASEE Mid-Atlantic Conference on March 28 at the University of Delaware.
"How to create a proposal, how to prepare a poster - they're all processes," Konak said. "The students all said they now have a better understanding of how the research community works. It's important for them to see what's going on. They're a pretty talented group of students. They might be doing future research on AI or something else impactful - these experiences [the conference] are the environments in which they will see what they're doing is impactful and important."
