The AI Education Project

The AI Education Project helps prepare high students – especially those disproportionately impacted by AI and automation – to better understand and interact with an AI-powered world by building an engaging, culturally relevant curriculum that teachers can use with their students remotely or in the classroom. We focus on helping students understand the ubiquitous – and often invisible – AI systems at work in their everyday lives, positioning our students to make better decisions about their future.

AI literacy is an essential part of civics for the new digital citizen. Learning, communication, career, healthcare, homeownership, access to reliable voting information – everything will be impacted by AI. The disadvantaged communities that stand to be hardest hit by the negative economic and social impacts of the technology are the least unlikely to have access to AI education. To gain the tools they need to navigate an increasingly automated future, every student needs culturally relevant education around AI systems, how they work, and their impacts – no matter what field they decide to go into.

We are committed to prioritizing the education of students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low-income communities, and communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing and transportation) are highly susceptible to automation.

We build digital high school and college curricula about artificial intelligence and the future of work, in addition to digital professional development that prepares educators to teach the curricula. The content is interdisciplinary, project-based, culturally relevant, and integrates into humanities, social sciences, and STEM.

Students learn about AI through four interactive modules: “What is AI?”, “What can AI do?”, “What are AI’s impacts?”, and “How does AI affect me?” Each module includes ‘Explore’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Show’ activities/assessments. The lessons are designed using a culturally relevant pedagogical framework that ensures students see themselves and their communities reflected and valued in the content taught. 

Our curriculum content can be facilitated through popular learning management systems like Canvas and Google Classroom, allowing students and teachers to access materials as part of in-classroom lessons or remotely at home.

We especially focus on reaching students from communities underrepresented in AI and STEM, through culturally relevant and highly engaging content.

Our long-term vision is to provide curricula for all of the 15 million high school students in the United States in any given year.

We are especially committed to prioritizing the education of students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low income communities, and communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing and transportation) are highly susceptible to automation.

Despite numerous K-12 career readiness programs, we haven’t seen any that also take into consideration the role AI will play in work skills development and training. We take a complementary approach to technical skills by focusing on the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed for an automated workforce by using AI literacy as a means to help students think about the social implications of AI technologies they will be using and creating. We provide a conceptual understanding of AI while exposing them to diverse role models, relevant media, and interactive instructional materials that help them develop a positive occupational identity.

We launched our curriculum with just over 300 students in May of 2020 (during COVID), and since then have scaled to reach nearly 20,000 students across six states.

The focus of many of today's AI education programs is addressing the talent gap that industries face. While we think it’s incredibly important to make sure that we cultivate a workforce of engineers and researchers to build and design AI systems (especially from underrepresented communities), we also need to be focusing on the AI literacy gap that impacts all people – even those who won’t go on to technical careers.

Broad AI literacy means everyday consumers can have more awareness, confidence, and trust towards the AI products they use; everyday citizens can actively engage in informed policy discussions about the technology; everyday workers can make more informed choices about the jobs they take or skills they acquire as automation and algorithmic decision making becomes more prevalent in the workforce.

There are a handful of organizations developing content about AI for the classroom, but nearly all of them are computer-based and focused on coding/CS.

We're one of the first organizations developing curricula that can be integrated into and taught by teachers in core subjects like history and English, and non-CS career/technical education classes.

We will reach nearly 20,000 students by the end of the spring semester. Our goal is to reach 50,000 students by the end of 2021. In the next five years, we hope to expand our reach to 1 million students globally.

5 full time, 1 part-time, 2 contractors

We recognize the importance of having staff and leadership who have shared lived experiences with the student populations and communities that we serve. As an organization, we focus on reaching students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low-income communities, or communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing or transportation) are highly susceptible to automation. We reflect these communities in our current staff makeup and in our hiring determinations.