NSF FF: Planning: From Black Box to Glass Box: Co-Designing Transparent AI for Middle School Engineering

Award ID: 2627515

This FINDERS Foundry award supports the development of a tool that integrates AI literacy into hands-on engineering challenges for middle school students. This project transform AI from a passive tool into a transparent, collaborative partner. The platform will include complementary interfaces for teachers and students: teacherfacing tools for planning and oversight, and studentfacing tools that expose visible AI reasoning during problemsolving activities. This AI tool fosters complementary human skills: critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity and prepares students for an AI-driven future. This FINDERS Foundry award supports an AI-powered platform designed to integrate AI literacy into hands-on K-12 engineering instruction. The solution features a dual-interface system that includes teacher and student facing tools. The teacher facing tool strengthens teachers' pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge to better teach hands-on engineering, manages instructional adjustments, and breaks down complex concepts. The student facing tool guides students to use AI in authentic, workforce-aligned engineering tasks as a collaborative partner rather than a bypass for critical thought. Co-design methodology will yield novel design principles for creating "Socratic AI" interfaces that effectively scaffold middle school students' critical thinking, problem-solving, and metacognition during authentic, hands-on, minds-on engineering tasks. 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