CodeJoy is Teaching about AI
Did you know CodeJoy is teaching AI for educators now? This past summer, our good friends at the Infosys Foundation USA asked us to produce and teach an AI course for teachers! We had a great turnout of educators who joined us to explore how AI can be useful in the classroom and particularly useful for teachers. Since then, we’ve taken a deeper dive into AI and reflected on that experience. We’ve come up with some ideas about what AI means for teachers in classrooms and rewrote that initial course. We’re excited to share our ideas and continue to explore this growing landscape with all of you.
Our Perspective on AI
AI won’t fundamentally change teaching. Everything we know about creating an effective learning environment still holds true. However, AI is likely to amplify both the positives and 
negatives in your classroom. Increased access to information, exposure to a wider range of ideas, and deeper connections to content can enhance learning; while AI could also make misinformation, low-effort output, and social isolation worse.
Now is the perfect time to engage with AI. The future is being shaped as we speak, and your voice is crucial in that process.
With that in mind, this fall we are launching AI learning experiences specifically for teachers. Here at CodeJoy, we design learning experiences that are creative, collaborative, and joyful. During these learning experiences, we want to limit technical details and instead focus on the following questions:
- How can teachers encourage students to be deep thinkers while using AI?
- What are the most useful AI tools or methods to offload a teacher’s most time-consuming tasks, allowing them to reinvest that time in working directly with their students?
- What aspects of AI functionality are important for teachers to know so they can make informed decisions about its use in the classroom?
- How can AI be used to create more collaborative learning experiences offline?
Our AI professional development starts from the ground up. We’ll focus on breaking down the basics, highlighting a variety of free AI tools, and working through activities designed to help you step confidently into the conversation. We’ll also briefly touch on some advanced tools, and even if you don’t choose to dive into those areas, our goal is to give you a clear picture of the AI landscape as it stands in fall of 2024. This way, you can begin charting your own course and mapping out how AI can support you and your classroom.
And remember: LEARNING SHOULD BE FUN! As we walk you through using and teaching with AI, we believe it can help you teach not only faster, but better, all while also being fun for you as a teacher!
Our Current Solutions
This fall, we are working on two professional development solutions for teachers: an asynchronous video course, and live PD sessions.
The Infosys Foundation USA has sponsored us to create a video course which will be available on their website by the end of the year. For teachers interested in learning on their own time, and on their own schedules, this is a great option! Once you create a free Infosys Pathfinders Online Institute account, you will be able to access this course (and many others) for free! We’ll be sure to tell everyone in our newsletter when this course is available, so be sure to join our newsletter to be the first to know!
In addition, we are launching live Public PD sessions! You can check out the Events Page to see what is on offer right now! If you’ve taken live PD sessions with us before, you know that learning with other teachers in real time can be a transformative experience. Maybe you can’t bring yourself to finish video courses (and you’re not alone—only 5-15% of users finish video courses from folks like Khan Academy and Udemy). Or maybe you believe like we do: that learning is a social experience. Participating in live PD will give you the opportunity to explore AI, and talk about it with other teachers. With times available for East and West coast teachers, we hope you’ll join us to experience AI together!
Our Approach to AI
In both the asynchronous and live PD sessions, we guide teachers to write an essay, using AI. “But I’m not an English teacher!” you may be saying. You may never assign essays at all in your class! And that is totally fine. We still think this practical application of using AI to write an essay will be a useful exercise for a few reasons:
- We’re going to use the essay to interact with AI through what it does best, language.
- We’re also going to use the essay to assess how working with AI can affect your ability to engage in productive thinking.
We hope you’ll work on this essay with us as a meaningful, structured interaction with AI. But don’t worry—we’ll also point out other applications for each AI writing activity in different content areas. Plus, we think this process will also be very useful for you as a teacher, using AI to do things like generate lesson ideas and create learning materials, and we’ll point out those opportunities, too.
In this course, we use “writing an essay” as a proxy for thinking, and if you’ve tried it yourself, you may have noticed that it is very easy to use AI to write an essay really fast without much thought at all. However, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that there are ways to use AI that might make your work not only faster, but also better, more supportive for struggling learners, and even MORE FUN—IF, that is, we teach our students how to do so.
History
For Summer 2024, the Infosys Foundation USA asked us to teach AI as part of their summer 2024 Pathfinders Summer Online Institute. We worked closely with experts and authors in AI education Aaron Maurer and Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth to create this course content. Matt and I piloted some teaching content this summer, acting as “lead learners,” and trying out different activities and approaches with nearly 100 teachers this summer. We’ve also now collaborated with Matt Miller, author of the popular “Ditch that Textbook” blog, read a dozen books, and experimented heavily with AI ourselves. We’ve consulted everyone from MIT to Code.org, and we’ve found that this space of AI in education is a bit of a Wild West. We’ve ventured out into the great Blue Yonder, and we’ve come back with some golden nuggets. Our goal with the opportunities we’re launching this year is to share those nuggets with teachers, and to empower you to join the conversation about “what’s out there” in AI for education.
Dive Deeper
Looking for more? Here are some of our recommendations on the topic of AI in education:
- “Co-Intelligence” by Ethan Mollick. If you only have time to read one book on the broad subject of AI, this is the one we would recommend. (Plus - it’s less than 5 hours as an audiobook!)
- MIT Article: Generative AI in K-12 Education
- Join our newsletter to be the first to know about more opportunities!
- Register for CodeJoy AI Public PD to learn more!