NSF FF: Planning: The Forge: A Collaborative Creative Environment for AI-Assisted Instructional Design

Award ID: 2627698

This FINDERS Foundry award assembles K-12 educators, researchers, technologists, parents, and students to explore how AI-assisted design environments can support teacher-centered instructional creation. There are countless teacher-generated, student-centered ideas for interactive learning designs, but many are never realized because transforming these ideas into viable classroom activities is time-intensive and technically demanding. This project unlocks the untapped innovation reserve through a teacher-focused authoring platform. The project establishes new pathways for teachers, students, families, and communities to collaboratively shape the future of AI-assisted teaching and learning. This FINDERS Foundry award develops a collaborative instructional design environment to translate teacher instructional concepts into working prototypes. The platform is conceptually similar to creative production platforms used by musicians, artists, and filmmakers, such as digital audio workstations or nonlinear media editing systems. Rather than functioning as a generic LLM prompt interface, lesson-plan generator, or learning management system, the platform will provide a range of teacher-specific authoring tools that will support iterative instructional creation, AI-enhanced design, multimedia production, and community sharing through a project gallery of adaptable instructional resources. The platform will be co-designed by educators, researchers, technologists, parents, and students who will work directly with AI coding tools to build working prototypes of interactive designs. The project will contribute to emerging work in human-AI collaboration, participatory design, teacher-centered educational technology development, and AI-assisted creative production. 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