NSF FF: Planning: Stakeholder*AI: A Collaborative Catalyst for Accelerating K-12 STEM Achievement through Teacher-Engineer Design Partnerships

Award ID: 2627642

This FINDERS Foundry award collaborative designs a scalable liaison between K-12 educators and university engineering design teams. The intervention reduces the temporal and cognitive load on educators, allowing them to focus on pedagogical delivery while undergraduate teams build hands-on science activity kits. By establishing a "community-in-the-loop" co-design pathway, where K-12 teachers, students, and parents collectively guide and validate the AI's outputs, the AI will translate classroom-tested pedagogical needs into actionable technical specifications, positioning K-12 students as active co-designers rather than passive recipients. The result is a scalable model for AI integration in hands-on learning that directly supports workforce development by fostering durable skills such as critical thinking and professional communication. This FINDERS Foundry award co-designs an AI-enhanced, co-creator pipeline that pairs educators with undergraduate engineering student design teams to co-design STEM instructional modules with interactive learning. The AI-enhanced platform maintains high technical and pedagogical fidelity by integrating K-12 Education experts' unique professional insights and a continuous memory of past conversations to effectively guide undergraduate designers. The platform promotes "cognitive catalysis", triggering human inquiry and need refinement, without inducing cognitive offloading or replacing the human-led design process. Steps to achieve the platform include an end-user requirements matrix derived from stakeholders; parent co-created data governance and AI safety protocols; and the co-development and end-user validation of a low-fidelity visual wireframe. 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