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’s 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.
The collaboration was made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation (“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 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.”
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 rhinking, not replace it,” in the Presidential AI Challenge.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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. “They become more socially sensitive, they discover themselves, and increase their entrepreneurial mindset,” he said.
Tricia Clark, associate teaching professor and information sciences and technology and program chair at Penn State Berks, said this collaboration aligns with Penn State’s land grant mission. “At 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.”
The NSF project lasts for three years. “Part of the main project is to do outreach that demonstrates the broader impact of your research,” 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.
For more information, contact Konak at auk3@psu.edu.