{"id":174121,"date":"2026-04-23T18:59:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/174121\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T18:59:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T18:59:07","slug":"penn-state-berks-works-with-wyomissing-high-school-for-presidential-ai-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/174121\/","title":{"rendered":"Penn State Berks works with Wyomissing High School for Presidential AI Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

WYOMISSING, Pa. \u2014 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<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

The collaboration was made possible through a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, titled \u201cEnhancing Critical Thinking in Introductory Programming Through Artificial Intelligence and Socratic Metacognitive Inquiry-Based Learning Environment,\u201d that included supplemental funding to support K-12 artificial intelligence teams for the challenge. Abdullah Konak<\/a>, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, is the lead on the grant.<\/p>\n

“Our role at the University is to put together a K-12 team \u2014 four student teams and two teacher teams,\u201d he said. \u201cThe teams had to propose a solution to one of the problems on the Presidential AI Challenge website by creating a video and prototype.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penn State Berks faculty held two on-campus workshops for the participating teams and offered a lot of offline support, Konak said. Boosting students\u2019 critical thinking skills in the age of AI was a key focus of the initiative.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal was to teach teachers how this can be a good tool to use without hurting students\u2019 critical thinking,\u201d Konak said. \u201cWe did a lot of research to facilitate that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teacher team of Curt Minich<\/a>, AP computer science teacher at Wyomissing Area High School and adjunct computer science faculty member at Penn State Berks, and Chris Killinger<\/a>, biology teacher at Wyomissing Area High School, were selected to advance to the regional level with their project, \u201cBioBuddy: Designing AI to coach student thinking, not replace it,\u201d in the Presidential AI Challenge.<\/p>\n

All six teams \u2014 including the four student teams \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow to create a proposal, how to prepare a poster \u2014 they\u2019re all processes,\u201d Konak said. \u201cThe students all said they now have a better understanding of how the research community works. It\u2019s important for them to see what\u2019s going on. They\u2019re a pretty talented group of students. They might be doing future research on AI or something else impactful \u2014 these experiences [the conference] are the environments in which they will see what they\u2019re doing is impactful and important.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WYOMISSING, Pa. \u2014 Members of the Penn State Berks information technology faculty collaborated with teachers and students at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":["post-174121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}