A recent federal initiative focused on artificial intelligence (AI) gave Penn State Berks faculty the chance to partner with students and teachers from the wider community. The Presidential AI Challenge seeks to inspire young people and educators to create AI-based innovative solutions to community challenges while fostering AI interest and competency, according to the program\u2019s website. Members of the Penn State Berks information technology faculty collaborated with teachers and students at Wyomissing Area High School to create projects for the competition.<\/p>\n
The collaboration was made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation (\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.<\/p>\n
Abdullah Konak, distinguished professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Berks, is the lead on the grant. \u201cOur role at the University is to put together a K-12 team\u2014four student teams and two teacher teams,\u201d he said. \u201cThe teams submit their ideas applying the Socratic questioning model. The 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. \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, 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, \u201cBioBuddy: Designing AI to coach student rhinking, not replace it,\u201d in the Presidential AI Challenge.<\/p>\n
All six 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.<\/p>\n
The four student teams presented their projects at the 16th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference, which proved to be an invaluable opportunity for students to prepare and be exposed to higher-level research.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow to create a proposal, how to prepare a poster\u2014they\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
Meanwhile, the Wyomissing Area High School teachers participating in the program and presented their work at the ASEE Mid-Atlantic Conference. Curt Minich and Christopher Killinger showcased the BioBuddy, a chatbot designed for teaching biology, while Erik Uliasz, social studies teacher, presented a Custom GPT for AP Psychology.<\/p>\n
Konak said opportunities like these are important for students to learn more about areas that interest them, which could lead to an eventual career, and to broaden their perspective. \u201cThey become more socially sensitive, they discover themselves, and increase their entrepreneurial mindset,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tricia Clark, associate teaching professor and information sciences and technology and program chair at Penn State Berks, said this collaboration aligns with Penn State\u2019s land grant mission. \u201cAt Penn State Berks, one of our goals is to connect with and support the community. For the students and teachers, they appreciated the resources and connection that Penn State offered to explore AI and how it can be integrated and used. The teams got to come to campus and experience something and make connections that they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The NSF project lasts for three years. \u201cPart of the main project is to do outreach that demonstrates the broader impact of your research,\u201d Konak said. To that end, the Penn State Berks team submitted another request for supplemental funding to be used on K-12 teacher training. The team is also considering additional community initiatives, such as holding a K-12 AI challenge on a local level.<\/p>\n
For more information, contact Konak at auk3@psu.edu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A recent federal initiative focused on artificial intelligence (AI) gave Penn State Berks faculty the chance to partner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":["post-175353","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\/175353","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=175353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}