It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday at Harmony Elementary School in Buford, Ga., about 45 minutes outside Atlanta. A gaggle of first graders sat on a rug festooned with ladybugs in the school’s bright, airy library. The children were surrounded by walls of books and tables that had been set up with Magna-Tiles and blocks.
“Here is a little toy,” a teacher named Shanaz Lakhani told the children, holding a plastic figurine. “We are going to think about our user, our little toy, and how we can build a sturdy home for her.” She asked the 20 or so students, who were starting to wiggle with restlessness, what sturdy means. A few of them shot their tiny hands in the air. Ms. Lakhani called on one kid, who said, “It means that everything is fine and secure.”
Ms. Lakhani affirmed the answer, and described how a sturdy home could potentially stand up to an earthquake or a very windy day; part of the activity involved students shaking the table to see just how hardy their structure was. She told them to focus on the feelings of the figurine. “She’s our user, right? We’re using our ‘user experience’ where we’re going to think, how can you build a strong home for her?” Ms. Lakhani put the children into small groups, and they scampered off to build their structures.
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There are few high-quality studies on the impact of artificial intelligence on K-12 students and teachers, and the results of the studies that exist are mixed. Stanford’s A.I. Hub for Education recently published a review of over 800 academic papers and found that “A.I. tools may help students complete tasks more successfully in the moment, but those gains do not always persist when students are later asked to perform independently.”
