Extending Existing Projects with AI

Overview

Teachers don’t need to reinvent their curriculum to benefit from AI. By embedding AI into projects they already teach, they can enrich trusted assignments with new dimensions of creativity and problem-solving. Students still practice core skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking, and now have tools that can simulate scenarios, remix ideas, or offer feedback that pushes their work further. This approach keeps learning aligned to standards while opening doors to deeper engagement, reflection, and discovery.

Example from the School Teams AI Collaborative

At Desert Edge High School, English teacher Selena Padilla extended an existing project to further push students’ critical thinking and analysis through embedding AI by:

• Reviewing projects and seeing where there were opportunities for embedding AI: Padilla reviewed projects her students had already completed and upcoming ones to see if any lent itself to a purposeful extension by using AI. She identified an activity that students were working on around utopias, dystopias, and societal factors. Students had studied these concepts and created new societies complete with laws, government types, and education structures, and made presentations about them on Canva. Padilla decided to extend the project by using ChatGPT as a Society Success Simulator.

• Providing clear instructions for what the AI does and its purpose for student learning: Students were given clear instructions on uploading their presentations into ChatGPT and also given a prompt to enter into the platform that asked AI to determine whether their society would turn into a dystopian society, and if so, how long would it take, and what factors would lead to it. AI served as a feedback giver, revealing flaws that students hadn’t considered, and sparked rich classroom discussions.

• Creating structures for students to maintain cognitive lift: Padilla included reflection questions for students to respond to as they read the output generated by ChatGPT about their society. These included questions on whether they were surprised by the analysis and what, if anything, they would change based on the feedback. This ensured that students were not passive recipients of AI but were using it to stimulate their thinking.

• Fostering human-to-human interaction using AI outputs as a jumping off point: Padilla projected onto a whiteboard a graph where students put a tally corresponding to how long ChatGPT predicted it would take for their society to turn into a dystopia (AI predicted most students’ societies would last between 20 and 80 years). This visual display immediately sparked comments from students like “Our societies did not last long! That’s not even my kids’ generation before it would turn into utter chaos.” Students shared their insights and ideas to improve their societies. Students had the opportunity to edit their societies and observe the impact of these changes on ChatGPT’s prediction of their life cycle.

Ultimately, this extension of the project deepened students’ understanding of societal factors and what causes them to succeed and fail while fostering peer-to-peer communication in an engaging way. The AI was able to analyze the societies of each student, which Padilla did not have the capacity to do. The AI output also led to human connection and deeper thinking for students.

See the instructions for the extension of the project, including the prompt and reflection questions. Also, hear from Padilla in this video as she voices over the project while showing the templates and tools used (i.e., Canva, graphs).

Apply This Strategy in Your Context

Building on existing projects is a low-lift entry point for teachers to embed AI into their instruction since they are not starting from scratch. Here are steps you can take to extend projects you already use by embedding in AI:

• Identify a strong project anchor: Review current or past projects to find one that asks students to create, analyze, or problem-solve. Choose a project that has an entry point for AI to be used as an extension. For example, are there projects that spark discussion or have natural “what if” extensions?

• Pinpoint where AI adds value and keeps the cognitive lift on students: Delineate the role AI plays and how students are still maintaining the cognitive lift. Make sure that AI has a clear purpose (e.g., feedback partner, iterator, simulator) and is not providing the final answer but sparking reflection, revision, and/or deeper inquiry. Use questions like “What surprised you? What would you change? How does this align with your original reasoning?”

• Design clear AI tasks: Provide students with clear instructions on what they are asking the AI to do. This can be as direct as providing students with the exact prompt to enter into the generative AI platform or providing students with scaffolds like sentence starters for prompts. As students develop their AI literacy, these supports can be removed, and they can write their own prompts.

• Encourage discussion around AI outputs: Use the AI outputs and student reflections to spark peer-to-peer and classroom discussions. AI should be used to facilitate more human-to-human interaction versus isolating students.

By extending existing projects with AI in this way, educators can build on what already works while unlocking new opportunities for creativity, critical thinking, and authentic learning.

This AI-enabled strategy was developed by a member of the School Teams AI Collaborative—a partnership between Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator (TLA). The Collaborative was developed to bring together innovative educators from schools across the country to share ideas and discover effective ways to use AI in the classroom.