Project Mentor: Professor Eric Obeysekare, Computer Science & Engineering
2026 Impact Fellows:
Harsimran Kaur '29
Charlotte Kraus '29
Ella Stephenson '27
Nathan Morales '29
Project Description:
How can we harness the power of AI to empower educators in the classroom?
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday life, with generative AI tools developing and spreading at an unprecedented pace. Education is no exception. Yet as these technologies become increasingly accessible, schools and educators are often left trying to understand how, when, and whether to use them without any guidance. UNESCO found that fewer than 10% of surveyed schools and universities had developed institutional policies or formal guidance for generative AI, highlighting the gap between the rapid growth of these technologies and education systems’ ability to respond. This gap is especially important in India, where teachers across diverse educational, linguistic, and technological environments—including rural and underserved communities—may encounter AI with very different levels of access, familiarity, and support. Teachers need more than access to AI tools; they need practical frameworks for understanding their limitations, evaluating their outputs, and deciding how these technologies can meaningfully support teaching and learning.
RAISE addresses this gap by focusing on K–12 teachers in India, particularly educators working in STEAM fields. In partnership with the Agastya International Foundation, the project is developing resources that help teachers build confidence and competency in responsible AI use while accounting for India’s diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational contexts. Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for educators, RAISE focuses on empowering teachers to use AI as a tool while maintaining human judgment, creativity, and hands-on learning.
The project's primary resource is the AI Compass, a practical guide for educators navigating generative AI. The AI Compass integrates DIYA, a prompting framework that helps teachers define their goal, provide relevant context, establish constraints, and direct AI toward a desired action, with SATYAM, a verification framework that guides teachers in checking sources, identifying potential hallucinations, treating AI outputs as drafts, and applying their own judgment. The Compass is supported by practical STEAM education use cases that demonstrate how teachers can apply these frameworks to lesson and activity planning, inquiry-based learning, explanations, analogies, and other classroom needs.
In the next phase, RAISE will continue testing and refining the AI Compass and workshop model through its work with Agastya, expand the resources into accessible digital formats, and explore how the approach can be integrated across Agastya’s broader network and eventually additional schools and educational systems. The long-term goal is to build a scalable model for responsible AI literacy among educators, enabling teachers to confidently use evolving AI technologies while preserving the critical thinking, creativity, and human judgment at the center of education.