AI Advocates

S2 E8: STEM Surge: AI Powering Future Innovators

• Lisa Dieker • Season 2 • Episode 8

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In this episode of AI Advocates, Lisa Dieker and Maggie Mosher discuss how AI is reshaping the future of STEM education in a theme they call “Surging Forward with STEM.” Speaking from the FLITE Center, they explore how artificial intelligence blends science, technology, engineering, and math into a powerful tool for innovation and discovery in the classroom. From student creativity to real world applications, the episode highlights how AI can energize STEM learning, empower future problem solvers, and spark curiosity across disciplines. 

Tune in to this episode of AI Advocates and discover how AI can empower your students to think creatively, solve real world problems, and reimagine what's possible in science, technology, engineering, and math.

AI Tools:
Project RAISE - https://www.ucpcfl.org/projectraise
Code.org - https://code.org/en-US
SchoolAI - https://schoolai.com/
Google Teachable Machine - https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/
Google Semi-Conductor - https://experiments.withgoogle.com/semi-conductor
Magic School AI - https://www.magicschool.ai
VOISS - https://projectvoiss.org/
Diffit - https://web.diffit.me/
Suno - https://suno.com/home 

Social Media:
X - https://x.com/KUFLITECenter
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/Center-for-Flexible-Learning-through-Innovations-in-Technology-Education/61563791019174/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/aai-flite-center

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I am Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Maggie Mosher.

Lisa Dieker:

And today we're going to talk about surging forward with STEM that AI-powering future innovators. We're really excited to think about how AI can kind of create this cutting edge discovery in your classroom. So, you know, we're talking about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but we're really talking about how AI is all of those in a blender, and it's really going to lift up and move things forward. So Maggie, I'll let you start with kind of your favorite beginning as we think about the power and the surge of STEM fields with AI.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah. Well, I will start with some tools that I really love. One being the easiest, which is Google View or Image, where you have the Google slide and you take a picture. I can do that in any of my classes. Now, for botany, I can go and take a picture of a leaf or flower. I can also do there's apps, AI generated apps that will are just for plants and animals, and I can take a picture, and it'll tell me the species, where it comes from, for plants, what kind of watering system they need, where they grow best, how they grow. And so it immediately gives a lesson through exploration, like I can take my students and have them take their iPads or their phones out to nature and start learning by just taking pictures of things. Imagine a biology class studying those local bird populations, and they can use platforms like Google's Teachable Machine, where they can train a simple model to recognize specific bird species and create fundamental information about those bird classifications. So there's just so much out there. For example, if I say I was in physics, instead of just reading about variables, I can use an AI-powered simulation now to change the gravity, the friction and the mass of an environment to see what it would look like if we didn't have gravity, where people be sitting and standing right now in this picture, the possibilities are just endless. What do you like about it?

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, so I think for me, it's one that we know math anxiety is real. Like over 87% of society has math anxiety. We know I had the privilege of running for almost 15 years the Lockheed Martin Math and Science Academy where we made k8 teachers, teacher leaders in math and science, and yet what we found is it's not that they didn't want to teach it. They didn't have a lot of background, and some had fear or lack of understanding. I also know that we're talking to a crowd that might have a co-teacher that you're like, wow, I teach chemistry, and Lisa's coming in. Does she know chemistry? If she doesn't. That's where I think AI becomes this gap filler in maybe content that you haven't learned since you were in high school, and maybe didn't even like it when you were in high school. Like sometimes I think the sciences and the math areas get phobic, and we get that in place, and then I think we pass that on to our students. So I feel like, AI can be that co-teacher. So I'm going to give you a couple of examples. So Code.org, is a great place for your students to learn basic coding without you having to teach them. Like, so if you don't know, learn with them. Don't, don't avoid learning in a standard that might be something in your state, that you're like, I just don't really like that stuff about plants, or I don't like that to think about how AI could be used to help you and the students learn together. That's one of my other favorite thing. And I also will mention two projects that I'm actually leading once called, well now I'm leading one. The other one is being led by UCP of Central Florida, called Project RAISE. That's ending, where we actually now have an AI agent. His name is ZB, that can teach kids how to code robots in a square. So think about maybe having, if you're a kindergarten teacher and you don't love some of this technology, having some already off the shelf, things that might be used, like Project RAISE. Project RAISE also allows students to have an AI agent to help them self regulate. So, you know, in STEM many times kids are really good at it. They're just not good at concentrating long enough to persevere in long division. Like, oh, every, every teacher in America is like long division. So I think it's the blending of of our fear of some of these areas, the AI's power in some of these areas, and considering a partner to fill in the gaps in so many areas. And we could probably go on and on for an 10 hour podcast in that but that's kind of one of my big ideas I hope people will leave with today.

Maggie Mosher:

And what I love, what you brought up is one of your OSEP funded grants. Because OSEP does fund some of these amazing grant. So we have one too, called VOISS, and what I love about it is it helps students who might be interested in simulations, middle school students are our specific voices in this specific program. And VOISS is a free program that teaches 183 social skills in 140 scenarios. And that program has actual middle schoolers who are the voices. Within these avatars. And so I think providing students the ability to become their own avatars, to create avatars, to learn through these avatars and simulations can be a huge thing. I also really love things like Magic School and SchoolAI both have a make it relevant source where you can have students find out. Why do I need to know these? Because I remember being in calculus and being like, where am I ever going to need to use this so they have this make it relevant, where I can see the relevance of math, I can see the relevance of whatever I'm learning right now in science and technology immediately, and how it's going to help me. I just have to put in what I want to be when I grow up, or what I what my interests are, and it'll immediately say, hey, this is why what you're learning matters in this world. And students can use AI tools to analyze real world data sets, from sports statistics to climate change statistics, and use those mathematical concepts to uncover insights that can help us with our future. I think that AI provides students at any age right now to come up with creative ideas to help us change our climate issues, to help us figure out how to how to do things more efficiently and effectively. I even think our students are going to be the ones to help us figure out how to make AI sustainable and not have such a large carbon footprint. So it isn't about AI replacing fundamental skills. It's about giving students the same powerful tools that students today as scientists and engineers have available to them, and helping them to have authentic, complex, engaging problems within their classroom environment that we couldn't provide 10 years ago to our students. They're now right there at their fingertips.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and so you mentioned the OSAP Office of Special Education Programs funding, and that was the other project that I wanted to mention that is very teacher facing in STEM and it's got a great, simple AI component. So our FLITE STEM Coaching grant kind of takes what Maggie was talking about as student facing and moves things and Project RAISE. Now this is more teacher facing, and there's a couple things it can do. It can actually allow you to wear a biometric. And maybe while you're teaching math, if you're the person who's like, yeah, math makes me nervous, or signs you could wear biometric and tag some of your own behaviors. And then what I think I'm most excited to share with our listeners is on that site, you can type in an area that you're struggling with, and we've harvested over 700 resources that talk about how to help teachers work with kids with disabilities in STEM areas. So it doesn't talk about how to teach fractions, but if sent kids to labs and it has not gone well, it gives you ideas how to manage the behavior in labs. If you're not quite sure how to open ask better open-ended questions, which are critical in math and science these days, then how do we move that forward? Well, and then my last one is going to just kind of be that. I really think that as you think about AI in STEM, it's really endless from Image Creation, you know, if you have a textbook that doesn't show a picture, and this is a true example, I did a black hole example, and I said, give me because, again, that's a really hard concept for kids to understand. And I did it in Diffit. And Diffit gave me the picture, gave me the passage, but then I took it and put it in Copilot, and I said, explain, like I did, ELI, explain, like I'm seven. And then I said, now ELI like I'm three. I love the three year old example. That's what I would use everywhere I teach. And then I did what you said so well. And I said, make it relevant. And I still the image that comes to my mind forever. Is it compared to black hole to a trampoline?

Maggie Mosher:

I love that.

Lisa Dieker:

Well, I know, and I'm going to leave our listeners to think about how that is and what that means. But what I love is now I have the same example in the same classroom, and a very difficult STEM content that Lisa Dieker would have stood in the room and said, see, I told you. Did you get it? When really Eli and AI and DIFFIT together gave me this menu of, let's see if you can get it without me. And that's what I think it really does for us. And that's what STEM learning is about the student understanding, not the teacher. So that's my last thought. Maggie, how about you?

Maggie Mosher:

I have two last thoughts. One big on what you just said about the teacher side. What's neat about those OSEP grants are they might be student facing but there's a teacher component that really helps them with that student facing piece. VOISS has the same thing. It's called VOISS Advisor, and you can go on and they can actually go through a student who's struggling in a science or math class with being bored or with talking out of turn, and figure out ways to generalize skills like getting patient and taking your turn in conversations and collaborating in your science cooperative learning groups and help them through that. As teachers, it has the lessons, it has the case manager, the case studies. It has videos to show them. I love that. And then my last piece would be, I recommend teachers just have fun trying different things, like Google Semi-Conductor, it has an experiment. It's a fun, interactive site that lets you conduct a virtual orchestra using your own body movements, and it's tracked by AI. I love that, and things like Suno like get students into technology through things like creating songs for them, or things that are really difficult, like photosynthesis. For some of our students, that process, they can put what that is in their own words into Suno, and it'll turn it into a song in whatever genre they enjoy listening to or whatever tune or tone or whatever instruments behind it. So there's fantastic ways to demystify AI and show its really creative potential in a hands on way, and to give teachers back that time so they can spend meaningful time with their students. So thank you for joining us for today's episode.