Keeping Gen Alpha Human: A Framework for AI Adoption in Schools and Homes

Gen Alpha is the first generation growing up with AI across both classrooms and homes. As AI becomes embedded in learning, assessment, creation, communication, and decision-making, a new challenge surfaces: preparing education professionals including district and school leaders, teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, and technology staff to adopt AI in ways that support children's development and well-being. Drawing on research, organizational change, enterprise AI adoption, and field signals from K-12 educators and leaders, Dr. Yi Zhang introduces a practical adoption framework: Build Capacity, Practice Stewardship, and Preserve Humanity. Participants will leave with practical approaches to AI readiness, leadership, and long-term success.

How to Lead with AI

Based on my book and years of experience as a school leader, I will share strategies for school leaders on how they can lead their schools and organizations in the age of AI. I will share the practices that I engaged in at my school to highlight what has worked and what has not. The session is designed to provide a few strategies for school leaders.

AI can write your students' essays, generate their code, and produce their art. So what's left for the humans? Everything that matters.

In this talk, I'll explore what it looks like to teach with AI rather than against it, drawing on real classroom experiences from both English and computer science. You'll see how students can use AI as a creative collaborator without surrendering the thinking that makes their work their own, and you'll leave with practical strategies for designing assignments where AI raises the ceiling instead of lowering the floor.

We'll tackle the questions keeping educators up at night: When does AI help students learn, and when does it just help them finish? How do we teach ownership in an age of infinite generation? And how do we stay honest about what we don't yet know? Come and experience a teacher's-eye view of what's working, what isn't, and what comes next.

NotebookLM has become a popular tool for students and teachers. We commonly hear that both groups like NotebookLM because it supports the student without doing the work for them. We'll look at some of the ways that teachers and students use NotebookLM and what that may suggest about how AI can support learning and learners.

The real promise of this moment focused on AI in education isn't about the technology. It is a chance to refocus on what has always mattered most including designing learning environments grounded in the science of learning, strengthening the skills that students will need long after the tools have changed, and prioritizing relationships and human connection that an algorithm cannot replace. This is our opportunity to look past the hype cycle and ask how we build classrooms where AI becomes one more resource in the service of something far bigger.

Most AI tools are dropped into classrooms, but Digimente IA was built with teachers. Partnering with education ministries in Mexico and Argentina, we surveyed 5,000+ educators to tackle their biggest hurdles: lesson planning, adapting for mixed abilities, and navigating strict curriculums. The result is an AI assistant, fine-tuned on official frameworks, that puts human knowledge first. Before generating anything, Digimente IA asks about your specific students and school context—you provide the insight, and the AI handles the labor. In this hands-on workshop (no prior AI experience needed!), you will explore our co-design process, test the tool's core interactions, and work through an authentic case study from a rural school in Hidalgo, Mexico. We will also share candid lessons from our beta on why capturing classroom context is harder than it looks.

Why do brilliant students endure grueling two-hour commutes to our North London specialist math school when AI could easily help them ace their exams from home? The answer lies in the community of fellow "math geeks" and our unique teaching philosophy. While AI might be a faster mathematician, it cannot replace the thrill of collaborative discovery. We use AI tools not to spoon-feed answers, but to create rich learning experiences where students uncover concepts as if they were inventing the math themselves under the tutelage of Newton or Pythagoras. In this session, I will showcase 5 to 10 lessons—like framing hyperbolics as regular trigonometry with imaginary angles—demonstrating how to teach meaningfully beyond the standard curriculum and keep human curiosity at the center of a high-tech classroom.

Description coming soon.

This session encourages people to, at least temporarily, "drop in" in their AI-ing. We're all using these tools and most of us have a healthy skepticism. But, there's something important and valuable about how we do things when we're not hesitating.

You'd be exploring this idea and leave as a more confident practitioner of AI. Think — I'm taking a ski/tennis/rock-climbing lesson with a pro, but it's actually AI.

In the session, we'll explore what the least hesitant AI-ers are doing in education and in software development, and work to remove some of our own hesitation through naming it, solving for it, and understanding a few concepts about what "AI" really is, so that we can lean into it when that that's the first thing to do.

Educators face complex classrooms with diverse neurodivergent and 2e learner needs—but evidence-based strategies rarely translate into real-time practice. This session explores how AI can close that gap by turning research into actionable, in-the-moment guidance.

Drawing on a collaboration between CHC, REEL, and an experienced educator/administrator, we'll apply strengths-based, neurodiversity-affirming frameworks. Using *Ellis*—a research-informed, chat-based AI thought partner—as a case example, we'll highlight four design principles:

- Translating evidence into contextual, decision-ready guidance

- Embedding strengths-based and neurodiversity-affirming approaches

- Supporting educator cognition and decision-making under time constraints

- Preserving human judgment and professional autonomy in AI-supported environments.

This session answers the question: How might we integrate AI in K-8 learning environments in a way that follows legal requirements and global standards, works within realistic resources and budget constraints, and prepares students for their future success? As schools integrate generative AI, immediate student access to Large Language Models can introduce compliance and pedagogical risks. This session offers The Cantilever Framework™, a plug-and-play model adaptable to K-8 school contexts globally. By building an AI literacy foundation early, schools can create a safe, thoughtful, and human-first culture around the technology.

The Cantilever Framework™ centers around:

* Legal requirements and global standards

* Staff professional development strategies

* Family partnership initiatives

* Student resources for age-based curricula

Attendees will leave with a roadmap for a K-8 AI literacy strategy that places the importance of humans first so that when students receive authorized access to these tools or encounter them outside of school, they are prepared to use them safely and critically.

As AI reshapes the workforce and entry-level jobs shrink, AI proficiency is essential for economic mobility. Yet, underserved public schools—particularly in NYC, where 80% of students identify as Black or Brown—are slow to adopt meaningful AI education, risking widened opportunity gaps. In this session, educator Addy Salau shares insights from the Relevant Futures AI Discovery Lab, a six-session pilot for 20 freshman girls at Bedford Academy in Crown Heights. Learn how these students unpacked AI concepts, engaged in civic debates about its impact, and leveraged AI tools to design social impact projects rooted in their own passions. Discover why expanding AI access isn't just about technology adoption—it is a critical push to ensure imagination, creativity, and future economic mobility remain accessible to all students.

As AI tools become increasingly accessible, the most important classroom shift is not choosing the right tool, but helping students develop the durable skills needed for future human flourishing. Whether students are actively using AI or simply living in a world shaped by it, they need opportunities to build trust, practice transparency, and strengthen their thinking.

This workshop session explores practical AI-integrated classroom routines that help students understand how AI works, engage with it honestly, and remain active participants in the learning process. Participants will examine routines that promote transparency around AI use, foster trust between students and teachers, and encourage critical thinking, metacognitive reflection, evaluation of outputs, and thoughtful decision-making over time. Rather than focusing solely on what AI can do, this workshop centers on the classroom structures and habits that help students grow in agency, discernment, and wisdom.

This lesson engages students in the potential costs and benefits of using AI for real-world problems, perspective-taking and empathy building, and using critical thinking to analyze their decisions based on new information. After participating in the lesson, educators will discuss pedagogical practices for supporting students in debating real-world issues. Educators will walk away with free lesson resources, tools to support students’ engagement in productive debates about AI, and access to the Tech’s online AI education resources.

As AI masters coding and content creation, high school students are left wondering: If AI can generate the answer, what proves me? "Proof to AI" (P2AI) was born when founder Shuai Yuan observed that while exceptional Stanford Math Circle students could solve complex problems, they often struggled to identify meaningful ones. Partnering with alumni Cyrus, she designed a framework to shift students from solvers to finders. Instead of competing with AI, students use it as a creative collaborator to develop what AI cannot replace: curiosity, judgment, and initiative. In this session, Cyrus will demonstrate building AI exploration agents, and students will showcase real projects like "Path Founder AI." Following successful launches in Beijing and Shanghai, P2AI is expanding across the U.S. this fall. Walk away with a replicable toolkit to launch your own chapter and empower students to bring the proof.

On New Year’s Eve 2025, Luo Zhenyu featured MarsNavi on China’s most-watched broadcast to over 45 million viewers. He showcased 34 video covers created by our 8–14-year-old students, proving that children learn AI best by delivering real work. At MarsNavi, a Beijing-based studio, students spend 6–15 sessions shipping user-tested AI products—from family-conflict mediators to elderly-companion agents. Since our 2024 MVP, we have guided 100+ children to deliver 20+ functional AI tools, analyzing over 10 million characters of classroom transcripts to build our L1–L5 progression and Seven-Step method. In this session, we will unpack four case studies, explore our identified "failure modes," and get honest about the limits of what we still don't know. We are here to share our work-in-progress with the educators and innovators most equipped to give us meaningful, constructive pushback.

This session is built from classroom case studies, not sample prompts. Participants will see how LLMs were used for real educator work: daily word study for learners with IEPs, customized reading passages, scaffolded comprehension tools, student goal-setting chatbots, project guides, progress notes, and full curriculum builds.

The session also looks at bigger builds, including an Oregon Trail-style Gold Rush game created with LLMs and a place-based water connections project. For each case, participants will see the original need, the tool or artifact that was built, how students used it, what had to be changed, and what failed.

The goal is practical transfer. Participants will learn how to spot strong AI use cases, build for one learner or a whole unit, test materials with students, revise weak outputs, and avoid the places where LLMs create more work than they save. Each participant leaves with case study examples, prompt sets, review checklists, and the start of a classroom tool or workflow they can use in their own setting.

In 2026, Benjamin Franklin High School pioneered a new AI Literacy course for our 9th graders. AI Literacy was interwoven with executive functioning skills in an introductory course, with a goal of teaching responsible and creative AI use. Come experience it firsthand: escape Zombie Island to uncover how LLMs actually process language, then take our AI "personality" quiz and learn to build your own custom version. We'll unpack the course's core framework and walk through standout lessons you can bring back to your own classroom. Other school initiatives such as the AI Podcast Club for teachers, the AI Innovation Contest, and the AI Environmental Grant program will also be shared briefly.

While 100% of children in our study could name a coping skill, only 30% actually used one when it mattered. Closing this gap isn't about better content; it is a design problem. Enter Troo, an award-winning AI platform for ages 4–11 grounded in the CASEL and Paul-Elder Critical Thinking frameworks. Troo champions "Facilitative AI"—technology designed to spark human connection rather than deliver passive instruction. Our pedagogical signature is the 3-to-15 Rule: three minutes of AI-driven story stimulus fuels 15 minutes of peer dialogue and real-world practice. The screen starts the work; the classroom finishes it. In this interactive workshop, you will experience a live Troo session built on a Predict-Reveal-Reflect loop, unpack our core design decisions, and explore how this learning bridges from school to home. You will walk away with a practical, transferable framework for evaluating intentional AI design in any classroom tool—not just a product demo.

As AI reshapes how we learn, work, and create, the most valuable skills may be the ones technology cannot replicate. Drawing on two decades of experience in technology leadership and mindfulness practice, Manpreet Singh explores how educators and leaders can thrive alongside AI by cultivating uniquely human strengths. Participants will examine the emerging world of agentic AI while exploring five essential human capabilities: vision, adaptability, lifelong learning, and mindfulness—that can help individuals navigate change with confidence and purpose. This session offers a practical and optimistic framework for remaining human-centred in an increasingly AI-driven world.

In the age of artificial intelligence, young learners need opportunities to explore ethical issues created by the increasing integration of technology and AI into our world, and science fiction can be an excellent spark for these crucial conversations. During this interactive session, YA sci-fi author Nicole Marie will engage participants in choose-your-own-adventure discussion activities that invite them to consider the underlying consequences of using AI. Drawing on her After Intelligence series, her experiences as an English teacher, and her recent workshops with teens, Nicole will highlight young adults’ concerns and hopes about AI and demonstrate how creative writing can elucidate teens’ nuanced reflections on the rapid scale of innovation. The session will incorporate research from Common Sense Media and The Rithm Project and will leave participants with lesson resources, thought-provoking questions, and the opportunity to examine their own feelings about how technology is reshaping our education system, our relationships, and our humanity.

An interactive experience for educators and learning designers to understand the power of fictional characters as facilitators of children's creative learning experiences. A small room will be transformed into an interactive art gallery with characters on display that interact with a mobile app that asks reflection questions based on the backstories of the characters. A small art table will feature DIY character-themed activities (such as animating handmade characters with AI, creating character paper puppets), and a small installation will feature a "character petting zoo" corner where attendees can play with 3d printed character toys. Facilitator will start with a brief presentation about the design and psychology of characters, followed by walking around the room and talking to folks about their character-themed experiences.

Schools rigorously vet data privacy, but often miss a critical blind spot: which foundational AI model is actually interacting with their students? Most EdTech tools rely on live foundational models (like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google) that can update their behaviors and safety policies overnight, instantly bypassing a district's initial vetting. In this hands-on workshop, we turn an original study of 50 K12 AI tools into a practical procurement method. We will unpack the three layers of the K12 AI landscape—direct model access, teacher productivity, and student-facing tools—and evaluate them against a clear disclosure-tier scale. Bring a tool your school is currently evaluating to pressure-test it live! You will walk away with our Model-Layer Diligence Rubric and the single most important question missing from every school's RFP, ensuring you know exactly what intelligence is in your classroom.

This workshop presents a practical framework for AI-native learning from Hatch Hatch. We will share a practical lesson framework that helps young learners move through the full journey from a rough idea to an MVP: identifying a meaningful problem, understanding a specific user, sketching an initial design, prototyping and coding, and iterating based on feedback. Rather than presenting AI as a shortcut to build a standalone product, the session will focus on how to help students use AI intentionally while preserving human ownership, judgment, and creativity.

This workshop welcomes both students and educators. We will highlight what the process looks like from ideation to development, when to use AI and when not to, and how to evaluate the quality of AI use. Educators will gain practical insight into scaffolding AI creative projects, introducing AI at the right moments and keeping learning centered on student thinking, not AI-generated outputs.

What if professional development invited teachers to investigate their own practice instead of delivering content at them? This workshop introduces the Heuta-Heuristic Framework™, a self-determined approach to educator growth that positions teachers as scholars, not recipients. Participants will explore the shift from pedagogy to heutagogy, then experience it directly through an interactive demo, walking away with a felt, not just theoretical, understanding of self-determined learning.

What makes a good manager in the age of AI? This interactive workshop starts from a belief that there won't be one answer for every manager. AI can now draft the feedback, summarize the one-on-one, and surface the data. Deciding when to use it, and when not to, becomes a values question, not a technical one. Participants will develop their own human-centered principles to guide that decision-making: a personal, portable set of beliefs about where AI belongs in how they lead, and where it doesn't.

We'll work through two questions: What will your principles be for yourself and how you lead? And what do you want your principles to be for those you manage? Because managers won't set just one expectation or guiding direction for their teams — there's a broad range — we'll make room for that. You'll leave with your principles drafted and a starting point for talking about AI with your team.

AI is arriving in classrooms faster than most schools can respond — and the gap between teacher anxiety and leadership strategy is widening. This interactive workshop brings teachers and school leaders into the same room to close that gap together.

Participants will move through a structured learning arc: grounding in the real state of AI in their school, hands-on exploration of practical tools (Gemini, NotebookLM, and others), an honest conversation about ethics and equity, and a collaborative 30-day action planning session. Every activity is designed for a mixed audience — because lasting AI integration doesn't happen in silos.

Attendees leave with three things: hands-on experience with AI tools they can use immediately, a shared ethical framework for responsible use, and a concrete school-level action plan built together in the room. No jargon. No hype. Just tools, trust, and a strategy that keeps the human at the center of every decision.

Stories shape our understanding of the world, but as generative AI takes over, cultural nuances often get lost—magnifying certain voices while erasing others. This interactive session for both students and educators explores how to keep the humanities critical and human-centered. We will kick off by comparing a local article with its AI-generated counterpart to expose inherent biases. Then, leaning on the research-backed MLA-CCCC and UNESCO AI Competency Frameworks, we will turn theory into practice. Students will learn to transform their AI agents into rigorous research assistants that actively hunt for diverse perspectives, while educators will design actionable classroom activities that teach intentional judgment and narrative analysis. Join us to collaborate and discover how thoughtful technology can deepen, rather than diminish, our exploration of the humanities.

In an AI-driven world, the future of education relies on developing our human comparative advantage: authentic collaboration and agency. While we can use AI to research and prototype, it is real-world accountability that builds the critical skills our students need.

Join me to discover a proven pre-apprenticeship model from Design Tech High, where teams of 10th graders partner directly with youth-serving organizations. Over one semester, these students conduct user research, test real products, and prototype solutions. When teenagers are given real trust and responsibilities that extend beyond a gradebook, they build unstoppable agency.

Attendees will walk away with:

* The Blueprint: Adaptable templates and a realistic semester timeline to launch your own program.

* Partnership Strategies: Actionable advice on securing collaborative partners and managing remote youth-org teamwork.

* Assessment Frameworks: Proven methods to evaluate durable skills like leadership, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.

Bring your computer and a problem you've been having as a teacher or administrator. You'll walk away from this workshop with a new workflow for using Claude and Replit to build custom tools for students, teachers, and even districts! No coding experience needed; it would be helpful to sign up for the pro version of Replit ahead of time so that you don't run out of tokens mid-workshop. I'll also share some of the apps I've built that have solved problems for our school or simply made my life simpler as an administrator. Let's create together!

Have a great idea for a classroom tool but absolutely no idea how to code it? You aren't alone. "Vibecoding" is just a very technical-sounding word for a very human process: building software simply by talking to an AI in plain English.

In this relaxed and approachable session, we will walk us through the basics of bringing our ideas to life without needing a computer science background. If you can describe what you want, you can build it. We’ll look at practical tips and tricks, focusing specifically on how we can use workflows to quickly create custom tools, both in and beyond the classroom, be it, assessments, interactive rubrics, or fresh teaching materials that actually fit our specific students' needs.

No coding experience required—just bring your ideas and a willingness to try something new!

Description coming soon.

High equipment costs and complex content keep gene editing labs out of reach for many under-resourced schools. To break down these barriers, we created CRISPRkit—a safe, cell-free lab that costs just ~$2 per kit—and paired it with a custom AI Teaching Assistant mobile app.

An On-Demand Co-Teacher: The app handles real-time troubleshooting, conceptual explanations, and ethical discussions, giving teachers the confidence to guide advanced topics without needing a genetics degree.

Smart Experiment Readouts: Students simply photograph their lab results, and the app automatically analyzes color changes to verify their experiment.

Safe & Age-Appropriate: Built with strict guardrails and grounded in vetted science so learning stays safe and focused.

Discover how pairing ultra-low-cost lab hardware with tailored AI creates a scalable, equitable model for modern STEM education—reducing teacher workload while opening doors for students.

This session delivers an inside look at my experience as a leading educator in the Creative AI media space. I will provide an overview of the core lessons I've learned from teaching generative AI to over 30,000 global learners through hands-on workshops, live events, and technical demos.

I will share how this large-scale educational framework directly led to my work with the Better Youth nonprofit, where we equip foster youth with essential tech and media skills to succeed in the workforce. Finally, I will provide an overview of the tactical approach my team and I have taken to humanize the learning process through collaborative team building exercises. Audience members can find us at our Expo table as well to experience one of these deeply human sessions where participants must work together to build, direct, and create AI media as a unified human team.

Project-based learning has long promised deeper agency, collaboration, and real-world problem solving. Yet it remains difficult to sustain at scale because students may pursue topics beyond any one teacher's expertise, teachers must support many unpredictable project paths, and young learners often lack the technical means to turn ideas into working products.

AI changes all three conditions: it expands access to domain knowledge, lowers the cost of experimentation and production, and offers partial support to teachers working across projects they cannot fully pre-plan. MarsNavi's most dependable use of AI, however, is less visible: a learning-data layer built from classroom dialogue and project artifacts. We use AI to produce post-session reviews, next-session coaching support, and longitudinal learner records.

In this workshop, Rui Li will share evidence from MarsNavi's online PBL programme and demonstrate anonymized examples from this data pipeline. The workshop will close with a facilitated discussion of how responsibility should be distributed among students, teachers, and AI, including the judgments that should remain human. AI is presented not as a replacement for educators, but as a layer of knowledge, production, and reflection that may make serious PBL more feasible while keeping human judgment at the center.

Curiosity Games: Project Mars is an immersive Algebra 1 learning platform that combines game-based learning, adaptive AI support, and real-time analytics to boost student engagement and mastery in mathematics. Developed through a “Human-in-the-Loop” approach, the platform keeps curiosity and human-centred learning at the core while providing personalised learning pathways and teacher insights.

Set within a Mars simulation environment, students explore key Algebra 1 concepts through conceptual challenges, procedural practice, assessment, and hands-on activities aligned with the M.A.T.H. Learning Cycle™. This pilot study with Khan World School students investigates how AI-assisted support systems can deepen STEM learning, strengthen mastery, and reduce intervention time outside live instruction.

Imagine having your teacher available anytime. Build A Teacher turns real classroom materials into interactive AI teacher clones that teach the way your teacher does. It learns from lessons to capture voice, tone, pacing, and teaching style so it understands not just the content, but how it is taught. BAT serves to extend and augment a teacher's presence, and not to replace it. Students can ask questions anytime, revisit tough topics in their teacher’s own words, and study with help that actually feels familiar.

Most AI in education is designed to reach children directly and is only focused on literacy and numeracy. I want to challenge that default.

Children's well-being is shaped by the adults around them, not just what they learn, but how safe, seen, and supported they feel.

At Rocket Learning, we scaled an AI-powered early education program to 4 million children. The leverage point wasn't the child, it was the adults (parents, community caregivers, teachers) around them. By designing behavioral nudges and AI-assisted content for caregivers, we changed what happened in the child's actual environment.

My work and research from Harvard's Human Flourishing Program deepens this insight: well-being is relational and emotional, not just cognitive. Half of all mental health conditions emerge before age 14. Yet most AI tools and benchmarks are blind to socio-emotional impact.

Drawing on VanderWeele's flourishing framework, child development research, and on-the-ground deployment experience, this poster offers a practical lens for educators evaluating whether an AI tool is actually serving the whole child:

1. Evidence-based guidelines for using AI with children vs. around children: what's developmentally appropriate, what to watch for, and how to decide which tools to introduce in a child’s environment and when

2. A starter framework for building your own AI stack, so you're getting meaningful support without negatively impacting your child's development

For over a century, traditional education has failed students with ADHD and learning disabilities by expecting everyone to learn at the same pace. While most AI tutors try to fix this by simply answering questions faster, ARIA does something entirely different: it teaches students how to think.

Built by a founder with ADHD, ARIA goes beyond assessing right or wrong answers by actively listening to a student’s reasoning process. By detecting seven real-time cognitive states—such as rushing, frustration, or sudden insight—ARIA dynamically tailors its response. It might ask a rushing student to articulate their plan or give a stuck student a tiny nudge, but it never simply gives away the answer.

Over time, ARIA builds a local, fully private learning graph to track focus hours, preferred explanations, and struggle patterns. ARIA goes beyond single-session success to foster long-term self-regulation and cognitive independence.

Projects can teach important, AI-resilient skills like creative problem solving and collaboration. However, current LMSs like Schoology and Canvas are not made for managing projects. They assume that all students are doing the same thing at the same time, and thus, are too rigid in structure. I personally experience this problem working with students on projects for Science Olympiad (SciOly) and ExploraVision. PBLMS is an LMS designed for managing student projects, with an AI agent that helps teachers generate personalized curriculums. It features a new UI, one similar to project management software like Jira or Monday. Since every project has a different curriculum, AI is critical to scale the teacher’s support.