NSF FF: Planning: Reading-Embedded Activity Design for Educators

Award ID: 2627436

This FINDERS Foundry award supports the co-design of a teacher-facing, AI-powered web application that generates lesson plans that integrate computer science (CS) activities into required English Language Arts texts. This app does not require teachers to be CS experts which makes integration across classroom contexts achievable. Co-designing with educators ensures that lessons are deployable within existing instructional time and through district-adopted learning management systems. The platform's architecture is transferable to other content areas such as science, social studies, math, without proportional increases in teacher training, representing a scalable infrastructure for CS integration across the K-12 curriculum. This FINDERS Foundry award advances knowledge at the intersection of generative AI, computer science and computational thinking (CS/CT) integration pedagogy, and English Language Arts instruction by developing and empirically validating a theoretically grounded four-stage instructional design model that does not require CS expertise from the classroom teacher. Unlike existing general-purpose generative AI tools, this project embeds curriculum context, standards alignment, and CS skills tracking directly into the generation architecture, enabling sustained integration dosage across a full academic year which is a function that existing tools fail to provide. Student voice is structurally embedded into the generation model through post-activity feedback producing a continuous improvement mechanism grounded in real classroom outcomes. The platform's initial target population is elementary and high school Enlish Language Arts classrooms with anticipated outcomes including increased frequency and dosage of CS/CT integration, measurable CT skill development tracked against standards, and meaningfully reduced deployment burden for classroom educators. 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