NSF FF: Planning: Co-Designing a Scalable Hosted Learning Platform for Secondary AI and Computer Science Education

Award ID: 2627643

This FINDERS Foundry award enhances high school students' access to AI and computer science learning despite technological barriers. While many schools struggle with limited staff, unstable computing environments, and strict IT rules that make coding lessons hard to run, this project designs a hosted learning platform that gives students a stable, easytouse coding space and gives teachers tools that simplify instruction. Students, teachers, and school leaders collaborate to establish research-based requirements to ensure a secure, accessible, and practice platform scalable to all learning spaces. The environment will support AI and CS lessons without needing special equipment or ongoing technical help. By making the technology more reliable, the project offers learning spaces the opportunity to build consistent offerings and provides more students the opportunity to explore AI and computer science each day. This FINDERS Foundry award collaboratively assesses the feasibility of a cloudhosted workspace environment featuring persistent student containers, integrated curriculum tools, and a teacher dashboard to support scalable AI/CS learning. The development of conceptlevel platform maps, curriculumintegration pathways, and wireframes for both student and teacher interfaces are guided by stakeholder collaboration. Targeted usability testing including requirements analysis will establish functional and instructional needs across a wide range of educational settings. Anticipated outputs include an adoptionfeasibility memo, a pilot plan outlining implementation constraints, and a roadmap guiding prototype development. The work establishes key technical and pedagogical conditions required for a persistent, cloudbased environment that supports equitable and scalable AI/CS instruction. 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