NSF FF: Planning: AI As A Subject And A Personal Teaching Tool

Award ID: 2627489

This FINDERS Foundry award helps K12 students gain safe, responsible, and meaningful AI literacy. Many schools lack tools that make AI instruction easy to use, personalized, and relevant to students interests. This project will design a platform where AI is both the topic students learn and the tool that adapts instruction for each learner. Using simple, ageappropriate interfaces, the system will generate learning materials matched to students interests, future goals, and preferred ways of learning. Teachers will keep full oversight, and families will have clear insight into how AI is being used. Students, teachers, and caregivers from rural, suburban, and urban communities will guide the design so it reflects real needs and builds trust. By expanding access to highquality AI learning, the project supports national goals to broaden participation in emerging technologies and prepare students for future careers. This FINDERS Foundry award collaboratively builds a detailed design plan for an AIpowered instructional platform which embeds a contextaware AI tutor within an AIliteracy curriculum. The team will work collaboratively towards modelselection criteria, promptdesign rules, retrievalaugmented generation architectures, and feedbackloop policies suitable for K12 environments. Codesign workshops with students, educators, and caregivers guides the development and validation of interactive wireframes that reflect authentic instructional needs. Constructing baseline evaluation instruments, such as measures aligned with the Generative AI Literacy Assessment Test, will assist in gauging learning outcomes and system usability. Taken together, the project deliverables include a prioritized requirements specification that captures technical, instructional, and userexperience needs; validated wireframes; and a plan for a future potential co-development phase which may be embedded within an Introduction to Computing and AI course. This research provides a foundation for scalable, responsible AIenabled instruction deployable through existing courseware infrastructure. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy