LEAD Southeast Middle School student Alaq Elseed isn’t old enough to drive yet, but this summer she developed a proposal for an app that shows which parking spots are open in a lot.¶
“It uses magnetic sensors and color-coded lights to help you with parking predictability,” Elseed said. “It basically helps you indicate which parking spots are open and which parking spots are not, so you don’t have to keep circling the parking lot, searching for a parking spot that’s probably not open.”¶
Elseed used the AI platform Playlab.AI to help develop her app project. The work was the culmination of the three-week Alpha AI Program that LEAD Public Schools created this summer for students like Elseed at LEAD Southeast and students at LEAD Cameron Middle School.¶
How the Summer Program Used AI
LEAD Instructional Manager Kenisha Clark said the public charter school network doesn’t typically allow middle school students to use artificial intelligence at school, but LEAD saw value in introducing students to some of the benefits AI can provide when used as a thought partner.¶
At the beginning of the summer program, which included collaboration with Tennessee State University, students were presented with simple challenges to solve using Playlab.AI, such as designing a toilet for students who are bullied or have disabilities.¶
“It was just these challenges, to get them thinking and then using AI towards the end of like, ‘Ok, we have our idea, we have the steps, what can we do to make it better?’” Clark said.¶
Students then advanced to more complex assignments and were asked to create something that they were interested in, or that solved a problem in their community.¶
LEAD Cameron Middle School student Angelina Tate is interested in cosmetology, for example, and she created a QR code that clients can use to choose which hairstyle looks the best.¶
“You don’t have to rush to pick something. You can take your time and know that your stylist is here to help you,” Tate said. “It was definitely fun.”¶
Solving Problems, Not Creating Ideas
Clark said one important part of the summer program is that students like Tate and Elseed didn’t use AI to come up with the ideas for their projects. Instead, they used it to identify and solve challenges for the concepts they envisioned.¶
“They would have their idea, it would ask them a question of like maybe, ‘How many days do you have to do this?’ And so, the kids would have to answer that question. ‘What materials do you have access to?’” Clark said. “It really focused on asking questions to begin with. It didn’t just spit out this completely formed idea for them. They really had to, in order to move on to the next piece, they had to answer those questions.”¶
AI Becoming More Popular
LEAD Cameron and Southeast are hardly the only public schools utilizing AI in the classroom. AI use has grown so much that Vanderbilt University has incorporated AI literacy into programs for future educators to help them make better use of the technology.¶
Andrew Hostetler, Vanderbilt Professor of the Practice of Social Studies Education, says AI can enrich the learning environment in a variety of ways, from design projects like LEAD’s Alpha AI Program to helping students learn through AI platforms like Gemini Notebook.¶
“So, you maybe have students trying to make sense of the Federalist Papers or complex texts. They can upload that, and it essentially does what SparkNotes or CliffsNotes, for those of us who are older, used to use, to get summaries of complicated written works,” Hostetler said. “In that sense, it can be used to create visualizations of those works, to answer questions.”¶
Hostetler says AI won’t just be a tool in middle and high school classrooms either. He points out that even younger students frequently have access to cell phones and laptops and are likely already using AI in some capacity at home.¶
He argues that AI will find a wide variety of uses in classrooms across the country.¶
“I think a mistake would be not just misusing it when we’re implementing, but another mistake would be completely removing it, trying to remove it from education. It’s a part of the world,” Hostetler said.¶
This is the first in a three-part weekly series on AI in the classroom.¶
