Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are quickly being incorporated into modern workplaces across nearly every industry, but what about the classroom? How does AI impact teaching and, more specifically, STEM education?
In a study released in July 2023, 62% of students ages 12 to 18 would consider a career in STEM. Of those students, 25% were most interested in pursuing a career in artificial intelligence.
As the digital era progresses, it’s crucial to align STEM education with future demands. AI plays a pivotal role in achieving this by improving learning experiences and thus establishing STEM identity for students at a young age.
Let’s explore how AI is integrated into classrooms, address concerns, and discuss ways to leverage AI for teaching STEM.
AI and STEM Education: Why It Matters
STEM education is more than rote learning—it’s about fostering critical thinking skills, creativity, and problem-solving in students. Rather than replacing hands-on learning activities, AI can enhance the STEM learning process for both students and teachers.
Does AI Belong in the Classroom?
Incorporating technology like artificial intelligence into the classroom is essential for keeping students engaged and curious to learn more. AI helps pull the real world into the classroom, where students can learn even more about how this technology works and how it can be applied to solve problems and work as a powerful tool for future problem-solving.
STEM education is centered around embracing new technologies and letting students experiment with these technologies themselves. Students will undoubtedly witness the growth of AI, and, by incorporating it into the STEM classroom, they can begin to understand not only this rapidly growing technology but other advances they may encounter going forward.
Keeping AI out of the classroom only delays their exposure to understanding how AI works and the benefits it brings to the scientific and learning processes. By bringing AI into the STEM classroom, students can learn how to work with AI appropriately and positively.
How AI Impacts STEM Education
The enhancement of the STEM learning process with artificial intelligence is already taking place in the form of personalized learning, automated administrative tasks, and data-driven educational insights.
Personalized Learning with AI
With AI education platforms, students can learn through programs that are adapted to each student’s learning style, pace, and strength, which can provide benefits in STEM subjects and beyond. By delivering tailored content and exercises that match their strengths and areas in need of improvement, students benefit from a truly personalized learning experience that is difficult to attain in typical classrooms.
For example, an AI-powered math application can identify where a student is struggling and provide additional practice problems in those specific areas.
Here are some examples of AI-powered personalized learning tools:
- Socratic: This Google-powered AI study tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate unique visualizations to explain educational topics and connect users to additional resources that might be helpful for learning a specific concept. This is especially useful in science and mathematics, but the app also covers other common school subjects.
- Photomath: Photomath provides step-by-step instructions for math problems of all levels. Users can take a photo of the math problem they are solving and receive personalized instructions on how to solve. By breaking the problem down into multiple steps, students get more than the right answer—they get to see how the problem is solved.
- Camera Math: Another personalized learning tool for mathematics, camara math provides unique math instruction for higher-level equations. Students simply take a photo with their camera, and they can see each step of how to solve for the equation.
AI Automation Tools for Teachers
STEM teachers are also benefiting from the efficiency of AI. A significant amount of time is typically spent on administrative tasks like grading assignments and quizzes. AI can automate these routine tasks, allowing STEM educators to allocate more time to interact with students, pursue professional development, and create innovative lesson plans that effectively teach STEM concepts.
Here are some examples of AI tools for teachers:
- Copilot Education: This is an AI-powered tool designed just for teachers. It can help teachers generate lesson plans, quickly create student handouts, and more. All of their tools are specifically designed to streamline the teaching process so you can spend more time interacting with your students.
- Yippity: Yippity is an AI tool that can convert any piece of text into a quiz or set of flashcards for studying. This can be especially useful in generating practice quizzes or assessments for students—saving the valuable time and energy of educators.
- Turnitin: An AI-powered plagiarism detector, Turnitin is a helpful tool for those teachers who worry about the integrity of their students’ work.
Data-Driven Educational Insights
AI tools are also being used to analyze large sets of student data to identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses. This information empowers educators and administrators to make informed decisions around their curricula, teaching strategies, and intervention plans.
In addition to these contributions to education, safely experimenting with AI in the classroom can help students better understand the technology and find positive ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into their lives.
Getting Started with AI in STEM Education
Implementing AI into STEM education is a dynamic process, but with continuous innovation, you can provide the best learning experiences for your students that prepare them for an AI-driven future.
Here are some tips on getting started with AI as a STEM teacher:
- Identify Your Goals: Outline your educational goals and how AI might enhance the learning experience of specific STEM subjects or topics.
- Research AI Tools: Not all AI-powered tools are alike, so it’s important to conduct thorough research for any tools being used in an educational setting. Explore different AI tools, platforms, and software that align with the educational goals you’ve set and look for tools that offer customization and adaptability for your classroom needs.
- Professional Development: Familiarize yourself with AI tools and techniques so you can teach confidently and effectively. Take the same approach to any STEM subjects you’ll be teaching, and if you are a Kid Spark Education customer, take advantage of our library of professional learning tools specifically for teaching STEM!
- Curriculum Design: Integrate AI-enhanced activities, simulations, or modules into your existing STEM curriculum. This might include using AI tools to help generate lesson plans, build visualizations for your lesson plans, create quizzes or handouts to support your lessons, and even help analyze and grade your students’ work.
- Instructional Support: As we saw in some of the examples above, AI tools can also serve as powerful learning tools. When students are feeling stuck or encounter difficulties with a new STEM concept, AI and machine learning can create a personalized learning experience to help guide them to success.
- Evaluate and Improve: Artificial intelligence is a new technology that continues to evolve by the second. Regularly assess the effectiveness of your AI activities and gather feedback from students and other educators.
Dispelling Misconceptions: Addressing AI Fears in the Classroom
While the benefits of integrating AI into STEM education offer immense potential, it’s important to also address the common fears and misconceptions that may arise from students, parents, administrators, and fellow educators.
These are some of the most common misconceptions about using AI in the classroom and some ideas of how to manage them.
1. Loss of Human Connection
Some worry that AI might replace the personal connections between teachers and students. However, AI serves to enhance the teaching process and work as a valuable tool for both teachers and students.
Teachers remain essential for guidance, support, and mentorship—especially in STEM education.
As more tools of artificial intelligence are used in the classroom, it’s even more important that our STEM educators are serving our students to help them navigate the digital world safely, effectively, and positively. Instilling this relationship with AI from the beginning can help future generations use artificial intelligence in tandem with authentic human connection.
2. Job Displacement
A common misconception is that AI will replace teachers altogether, particularly in combination with virtual reality and digital learning. In reality, AI is a tool—albeit a powerful one. While we cannot predict the future of artificial intelligence, it is true that students need real and diverse positive STEM mentors for learning, and this is unlikely to change.
While working with AI, STEM teachers will continue to be indispensable for critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and fostering a love and passion for learning.
3. Privacy
The concerns about student data privacy are very valid. It’s important to choose AI tools that prioritize data security and compliance with regulations like GDPR and COPPA. Educational AI tools from established institutions are more likely to adhere to these privacy standards. It’s always recommended to conduct thorough research into the AI tools you’re introducing to your students.
In addition to choosing more secure AI technologies, STEM educators should also make it a priority to teach their students about how their data is used and stored by digital tools. While creativity and exploration are fundamental values of STEM education, it’s important to train students in how to navigate new technologies safely.
4. Academic Dishonesty
Many educators are concerned about the integrity of their students’ work with the prevalent use of AI. This, too, is a valid concern for all educators, including STEM teachers.
The best way to approach this in the classroom is to be open and direct about the use of AI. Providing designated STEM projects where students can responsibly interact with artificial intelligence can help teach students in the best practices and integrity of using AI in education.
You might also consider incorporating designated steps into a project that use AI tools, to help guide responsible use of artificial intelligence.
How to Use AI to Teach STEM
Artificial intelligence is a powerful complement to teachers, but it shouldn’t be a replacement. When using AI to teach STEM in the classroom, teachers should look for opportunities in two main areas:
Using AI for Interactive Learning
AI can facilitate interactive learning in any area where ideas need to be generated, personalized feedback is valuable, data needs to be analyzed or visualized, or computer science skills need to be practiced.
In practice, this might look like using AI for personalized tutoring on a subject where a student can receive feedback of their responses in real-time, or using AI to consolidate and organize information so it’s more manageable to work with on a project. With AI in STEM education, students can access more data and information in a simplified and accessible way.
Automating Tasks with AI
The second way AI can be used to teach STEM is to assist the educator’s role by automating repetitive tasks like grading, generating questions and assessments, and making data sets more manageable for projects.
Where it once took hours to craft original quizzes or practice questions and possibly find the supporting data for real-world examples, artificial intelligence can quickly find relevant data and generate multiple questions. This simplifies the workload for teachers and saves them time while creating more learning opportunities for students as they can practice their skills with numerous questions and problems to solve.
5 STEM Activities Using AI
Here are a few ideas to get started with AI in the classroom. The following AI lesson plan ideas can be adapted to fit the needs of your STEM classroom:
1. Exploring Machine Learning with Image Recognition
Introduce students to the world of machine learning by teaching them about image recognition. Use a simple AI tool like Google Vision AI and have students experiment with feeding the AI different images and observing its accuracy in recognizing objects.
Afterward, discuss as a class the ways this AI technology can be used to make a positive impact. Identify the different STEM technologies and concepts that went into the experiment.
Combining the exploration of technology with a brainstorming session of its possible applications flexes students’ creative and problem-solving skills.
2. AI-Powered Storytelling
Have students collaborate with AI to write original stories. Students can frame out their plot elements and observe as AI suggests plot twists, character developments, and settings. This activity not only sparks the imagination but also demonstrates the power of AI as a potential creative partner while encouraging creativity.
This project can also be a good opportunity to discuss ethics in AI and how to properly disclose use of AI on projects.
3. Virtual Science Experiments
With a combination of AI and virtual reality, students can engage in science experiments that might otherwise be impractical due to resource constraints. In a virtual lab, they can simulate chemical reactions, explore physics phenomena, or even dissect virtual specimens.
Resources like University of Washington offer lessons like this Virtual Frog Dissection.
4. Coding and AI Chatbots
In Kid Spark Education’s STEM curriculum, we introduce students to the fundamentals of coding and robotics—an adjacent fluency to understanding the logic of artificial intelligence.
It seems clear that AI will play a large role in many aspects of our lives in the future, but to understand this modern technology, it is vital to educate students in the core principles of STEM and coding which serve as the foundation of artificial intelligence.
The natural progression for AI and STEM education should start with basic STEM principles, then move toward coding. These STEM skills are all found in Kid Spark Labs, complete with multiple lesson plans, instruction units, reusable engineering and robotic components, and professional development tools for teachers. Explore the Kid Spark elementary school robotics and coding curriculum here and the middle school robotics and coding curriculum here.
Once students understand basic coding principles, you can have students experiment and build their own simple codes.
5. Predictive Analysis with the Environment
Environmental and climate studies are becoming increasingly more relevant to today’s students. That makes these topics a great opportunity to integrate real-world experiences with STEM education.
In groups or as a class, you can create AI models that analyze different environmental data. They might explore real-time air quality measurements, track deforestation patterns using satellite imagery, or predict climate trends based on historical data. With a constant stream of new data, this AI STEM project can be an ongoing or seasonal activity with your students.
Empowered Educators Empower Students
The integration of AI in K-12 STEM education is a transformational step toward preparing students for a technology-driven future. By embracing the power of artificial intelligence early, STEM educators have the opportunity to teach students how to interact safely and responsibly with artificial intelligence.
Creative lesson plans, hands-on experiences, and real-world applications are at the heart of effective STEM instruction and in each lie an opportunity to incorporate AI technology. As AI continues to evolve, K-12 educators have the opportunity to shape the next generation of thinkers, problem solvers, and innovators. By embracing AI as a powerful ally, educators can pave the way for a brighter future in STEM and equip students with the skills they need to thrive in an AI-enhanced world.
At Kid Spark Education, we’re dedicated to supporting educators with the tools they need to teach STEM from Pre-K through Grade 8. Our comprehensive STEM programs include complete curriculum tools, robust and reusable engineering and robotic components, and professional learning resources for educators to teach confidently and effectively.
To learn more about bringing Kid Spark’s STEM programs to your school, contact us today.