2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Generative (Gen) AI has been impacting all our lives since it became mainstream after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. High school teachers have expressed a desire to use it in their classrooms. But they face a host of challenges, from technical to policy constraints. Anecdotal survey of teachers shows that they are eager to use Gen AI in teaching their students, but they do not feel they have the technical background, and therefore the confidence, to use it. They are also bogged down by the AI policies of their school districts and the resistance of school administrators allowing the use of AI from the fear that it will shortchange students' learning.

This BPE (Broadening Participation Engineering) program is designed to address these challenges. First, it provides high school teachers with an in-depth technical background of Gen AI and how to use it in classrooms. Second, it equips them with technical expertise in Gen AI to enable them to work with school administrators to assure them that Gen AI will benefit students and enrich their learning experience, contrary to the common belief of degrading students' learning.

The BPE program runs for three years, training 10 high school teachers from the greater Boston area each summer. The program offers one summer week of intensive PD (professional Development), followed by monthly callback meetings during the following academic year. The final deliverables of the PD are developing Action Plans and AI-based lesson plans to use in their STEM teaching when they return to their schools in the following academic year.

We offered our program this summer of 2025 for the first time. It was a huge success based on the feedback we have received so far. Teachers' attitudes and knowledge changed 180 degrees. They can with almost zero AI and be left armed with enough knowledge and confidence to use AI in their classroom. As proof of our program's importance, we had to enroll 12 teachers this year: two above the yearly limit to fulfill the demand.

This extended abstract presents the program details, objectives, deliverables, and daily topics. It also highlights teachers' feedback and sample action plans they developed by the end of the summer PD week. We will also discuss sample prompt engineering examples as well as examples of AI hallucination. Adjustments to the program for next year's offering are also discussed.