NSF FF: planning: fostering AI literacy for high school students and teachers with AI-powered robots

Ended Project Grant Awarded

Award ID
2627611
Recipient
Awarding agency
Obligated
$49,899

Award facts

Assistance listing
47.084 NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships
Completion date
Place of performance
Springfield, IL 62703, USA

Award details come from USAspending.gov.

Description

As the agency reported it.

Abstract
This finders foundry award supports the creation of an affordable AI-powered robot that allows students to create new behaviors through verbal prompting rather than having to write code. Robots are increasingly common in everyday life. K-12 robotics instruction is largely limited to low-level programming and teleoperation rather than artificial intelligence technologies. The interdisciplinary team will pilot experiments with high school teachers, students, and parents to test the hardware, the AI concepts, and the fit for a real classroom environment. By lowering costs and simplifying learning, the project lowers the barriers to participation in AI?powered robotics education. This finders foundry award advances knowledge in computer science education in high school by exploring how low cost robotic platforms can teach artificial intelligence concepts to high school students. By shifting the focus from writing computer code to creating intelligent behaviors through verbal prompts, the research investigates new methods for lowering the barrier to AI literacy. The robot uses open source programming framework and a large language model to give the robot a broad range of capabilities, including language understanding and image analysis. IT also incorporates speech recognition and generation services, and computer vision capabilities. The tools offers four graphical displays that help make the robot?s operation transparent to students, e.g., showing how the vision system perceives the world, the contents of the robot?s world map, and the outputs of its particle filter and path planner. The interdisciplinary team will CO-design curriculum resources and measure student learning based on their ability to connect robot functions to core AI concepts to promote scalable, low?cost AI?literacy expansion. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are planned for this award.

Quick answers

Who received award 2627611?

2627611 was awarded to University Of Illinois by National Science Foundation on July 15, 2026.

How much is award 2627611 worth?

$49,899 has been obligated on 2627611.

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