2024 Henry and Bryna David Lecture: K-12 Education in the Age of AI

The slow, relentless creep of computing is currently in overdrive with powerful artificial intelligence tools impacting every aspect of our lives. What should learners and teachers understand about these technologies in order to use them in ways that are empowering and equitable? What role can policy, research, and education stakeholders play to ensure that these tools are leveraged to serve our goals of educating the next generation of citizens and problem solvers? And most importantly, what are enduring lessons from the social sciences in guiding and envisioning socio-technical learning systems in the age of AI?

Shuchi Grover, director of AI and education research at Looking Glass Ventures, will address these questions and more as she delivers the 2024 Henry and Bryna David lecture.

Grover is a computer scientist and learning scientist by training who has been committed to pre-kindergarten to 12th-grade computing education in formal and informal settings for over two decades. Her website describes her as “focus[ing] on the design of curricula, assessments, tools, and environments that help develop 21st-century competencies; as well as social, cultural, cognitive and socio-emotional processes that nurture the development of creativity, critical thinking, and interest in STEM disciplines.” She is an editor and co-author of the 2020 book Computer Science in K-12: An A-Z Handbook on Teaching Programming.

Grover received a Ph.D. in learning sciences and technology design with a focus on K-12 computer science education from Stanford University as well as master’s degrees in education (from Harvard University) and computer science (Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland). She received bachelor’s degrees in computer science and physics from India’s Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. 

The annual Henry and Bryna David lecture has been endowed to bestow an annual award to a leading researcher who has drawn insights from the behavioral and social sciences to inform public policy.

Henry David was a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, executive director of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, president of the New School for Social Research, dean of the graduate faculty of political and social sciences at Columbia University, and executive director of the National Manpower Council. Bryna David was also active in public policy, working as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt during the 1948 UN General Assembly in Paris, as a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, and as director of the National Manpower Council.

Grover’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A session. For those attending in person, a reception will be held following the lecture.