Stanford Digital Education creates AI curriculum for high schools

A new project at Stanford Digital Education (SDE) aims to help high school students better understand how artificial intelligence works and how it could affect their futures.

The program made its debut in 2024 at North Star Academy Washington Park High School in Newark, New Jersey, and is now undergoing a second pilot at Niagara Falls High School in Niagara Falls, New York.

The initiative involves SDE team members and high school teachers working to develop a curriculum about AI, which is intended to be used in tandem with Google’s AI Essentials online course. 

The SDE lessons, which will ultimately be available online, are being designed so that teachers in a variety of subjects can take them “off the shelf” and include them as part of their courses. The lessons also can lead to high school students earning a Google Career Certificate for AI Essentials, which provides an introduction to AI and teaches the basics of using AI tools. The Google course, which is separate from the SDE lessons, is estimated to take eight hours to complete.

SDE’s AI project grew out of SDE team members participating last year in beta testing of AI Essentials. This work led SDE to the idea that Google’s material could benefit high school students enrolled in SDE’s Computer Science 105: Introduction to Computers course. Google granted SDE permission to provide select high school students with access to AI Essentials at no cost.

Introducing AI’s potential benefits and risks to high schoolers

One of the first schools to try AI Essentials was Birmingham Community Charter High School in Los Angeles. Twenty-two students earned Google Career Certificates. In evaluating the experience, SDE and its high school teacher advisors saw the potential to design additional lessons that could wrap around the Google curriculum. The new lessons provide additional context on the history of AI, how it’s being developed, and ethical considerations about its current and future uses. 

“The central theme of this program is that there’s a healthy tension between the perils and promises of AI,” said Mike Taubman '04, a Stanford Digital Education fellow who has taught high school for 20 years and is now director of Washington Park High School’s Summit Program. “We want students to reflect on the ways AI is going to be transformative and the ways we need to be skeptical of it.” 

Last fall, about 90 students at Washington Park, which is part of the Uncommon Schools charter network, sampled the SDE curriculum, under the direction of Taubman, who is one of the developers. In keeping with the goal of providing a curriculum that is easy for teachers to adapt to their existing workload, Taubman integrated the AI lessons into Washington Park’s Summit Program, a career exploration course in which students consider future pathways they might want to pursue. 

Taubman devoted roughly 10 hours to discussing the Stanford Digital Education AI lessons in the three sections of the career explorations class. He was often joined via Zoom by SDE Fellow Parth Sarin, whose research provided a framework for the lessons. In addition to these lessons, 24 of Taubman's students tried out the Google AI course, with support from Sarin and Taubman.

Taubman said that a key objective of the SDE lessons is to draw students’ attention to difficult issues raised by AI today rather than focus on hypothetical apocalyptic future scenarios that often dominate public discussion. His course covered concerns about misinformation related to AI; the impact AI is having on energy use and global warming; current conditions for global laborers who do the grueling work required to create the huge data sets needed for AI; and the influence of AI magnates.

Building AI modules into career pathway courses

But perhaps most relevant to students, the course led them to examine how AI-driven automation is affecting their employment prospects.

“We looked at the immediate questions for high school kids right now: as you're finishing high school, in what ways will AI supplement your work, in what ways do you need to be prepared to use AI, and in what ways does AI problematize your career plans?” he said. 

The lessons provided students with hands-on exercises that helped them to understand how AI works and how they can use it in their daily lives. One session, for instance, taught students to write prompts to generate images using AI applications such as DALL-E. Another involved a tool that demonstrates how AI systems are trained.

Taubman and Sarin are now working on teaching the SDE AI lessons and Google's AI Essentials with Molly Chiarella, who has been teaching the Stanford Digital Education course Computer Science 105: Introduction to Computers at Niagara Falls High School (NFHS) in western New York. Chiarella has class every day with her students, and introduced them to the SDE AI curriculum and Google's AI Essentials earlier this month after they had completed all their work for CS 105. 

Both the AI and CS 105 lessons are part of the school’s computer science career pathways program. The 10 NFHS students currently enrolled in the AI unit are the second cohort at the school to take CS 105, following the group of NFHS students who completed the course last spring. 

"CS 105 and the additional AI lessons from Stanford and Google provide our students with a comprehensive introduction to the computer science field,” said Bryan Rotella, NFHS administrator. “It opens their eyes to the possibilities of future careers in an industry that they previously only knew as consumers.”

The SDE team is planning to incorporate feedback from NFHS educators and students into the lessons. The goal is to make the lessons available online by 2026. The lessons may also be offered in the future to high school students who enroll in a Stanford AI course, Exploring Artificial Intelligence, now in development by Patrick Young, the lecturer in the Stanford Computer Science Department who created CS 105.

In addition to Sarin and Taubman, development of the AI curriculum is supported by Michael Acedo, SDE's assistant director of project innovation and technology, and Lindsay Humphrey, a teacher at Birmingham Community Charter High School in Los Angeles who advises Stanford Digital Education on its projects.

Other resources related to artificial intelligence can be found at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and Classroom-Ready Resources About AI for Teaching (CRAFT), a project of HAI and Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Jonathan Rabinovitz is communications director for Stanford Digital Education.   

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Photos of Acedo, Chiarella, Humphrey, Rotella, and Taubman are by Aaron Kehoe.