The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded North Carolina State University a five-year, $20 million grant to support research on artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can generate interactive narratives effective at engaging K-12 students and improving learning. The grant is a renewal of a previous five-year, $20 million award that established the NSF AI Institute for Engaged Learning (EngageAI) at NC State.

“This grant reflects the strength of NC State’s research in artificial intelligence and education,” says Jim Pfaendtner, executive vice chancellor and provost of NC State. “Our researchers and partners are taking on a real-world challenge: how to use new technology to help teachers create better learning experiences for students. That is exactly the kind of impactful, collaborative research a land-grant university should lead.”

The EngageAI Institute draws on the expertise of AI and education researchers at NC State, Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University, and the nonprofit organization Digital Promise.

“During the first five years of the EngageAI Institute, we made significant advances in AI-enabled learning technologies and developed a suite of tools that will serve as the foundation for creating highly effective and deeply engaging learning experiences for K-12 students,” says James Lester, principal investigator of the new award and the Goodnight Distinguished University Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at NC State.

“This included findings from a multitude of classroom studies to investigate how AI-generated supports actually make a meaningful difference for students, particularly in collaborative learning.”

The new award will allow researchers to build on the previous work in three ways.

“First, this continued funding will allow us to create a self-improving system that can get better and better at both engaging with students and helping them learn more effectively in real time,” says Lester. “The system will actually get better over the course of a school year as it works with students.”

Second, the researchers will tap into emerging “world model” AI technologies for narrative generation, which will effectively give the system state-of-the-art storytelling capabilities – which hold enormous potential for student learning.

Third, the researchers plan to expand the ability of teachers and students to author the narratives generated by the technology, which will help tailor story-based learning experiences to the classroom.

“One of the principles we’re keeping at the core of this work is agency-centered learning, ensuring that students feel empowered,” says Wookhee Min, a senior research scientist at NC State and managing director of the EngageAI Institute. “Students need to have a sense of ownership; that can have a meaningful impact on their level of engagement, their learning outcomes and the learning process.”

“The research we are doing under this award will produce transformative advances in our understanding of how people learn – and lead to technologies that will fundamentally improve both the learning process and learning outcomes for K-12 students,” says Lester.

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This post was originally published in NC State News.