As Fairfax County Public Schools leaders consider a policy to guide the usage of artificial intelligence in classrooms, a lab program from Virginia Tech is already preparing some students to be at the forefront of technological change.
Bucknell Elementary School in Groveton is the new home of the Thinkabit Lab Innovation Space, a tactile learning hub developed by the wireless technology manufacturer Qualcomm that’s designed to pique students’ interests in science and prepare them for careers in technology.
A collaboration between FCPS and Virginia Tech, the lab opened in 2016 on Virginia Tech’s Northern Virginia Center campus in Idylwood but moved to Bucknell this year because it had the ideal amount of space and proximity to other schools in the county.
Teachers from the division’s 122 elementary schools can apply for one of the semi-weekly, half-day field trips to the Thinkabit Lab. As the host school, Bucknell’s fourth, fifth and sixth graders get the full Thinkabit experience weekly for the entire school year, principal Rashida Green says.
“I’m grateful for both — grateful that we can be here for Fairfax County and students traveling, and as the principal of Bucknell, clearly, I’m very grateful that our students have the opportunity to learn over time,” Green said.
The Thinkabit Lab field trips are competitive, and time slots fill quickly, said Yetta Williams, an advanced academic resource teacher at Bren Mar Park Elementary School in Lincolnia.
Last Thursday (Oct. 16), Williams led a group of 27 fifth graders from the Bren Mar Park’s Advanced Academics Young Scholars program on a visit to the lab to participate in STEM-specific career exploration activities.
Her students are gaining a deeper understanding of innovation, invention, and engineering principals through hands-on group projects, Williams said.
For their group project, Bren Mar Park students Mya, Maryam and Elizabeth conceptualized a drone service delivering goods to consumers’ doorsteps, not unlike the Amazon and UberEATS business model.
“When people in the future get tired of delivering packages, they can use a drone,” said Mya, 9. Once the package is received, the person would send the same drone back to the company.
“It looks kind of crazy,” Mya said of the trio’s robotic creation. “But it’s very helpful in the future.”
Another component of Thinkabit is the Career Exploration Room, a space where children learn about themselves and how their interests translate into future careers.
Students write their strengths, interests and values on white boards and discuss them. After a lesson on differentiating AI content from unmanipulated real content, one student asked if they could work as an AI detector and wondered if the job exists, said Jessica Ittayem, Thinkabit’s lab manager.
It does, actually. Programs like the generative AI writing tool Grammarly have a way of detecting if AI was used in writing, Thinkabit Lab Director Jim Egenrieder said.
Career exploration is one thing that is under-exercised in schools, he said, but at Bucknell, students as young as 5 and 6 have access to the lab and are already engaging in these activities.
“They can’t write their dream jobs, but they can draw them,” Egenrieder said.
He predicts that the jobs of the future likely to be sustained beyond the introduction of AI are jobs in information technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), a term for the growing network of interconnected devices that can be found increasingly in both homes and industries from transportation to manufacturing.
“You use IOT all the time and you don’t realize it. You can turn on your smart [home] thermostat; you can use your Tile [Tracker] to figure out where you left your backpack or your briefcase,” Egenrieder said. “All of those things are examples of IoT.”
The Thinkabit Lab offers every child a hands-on, inquiry-based learning experience, he added.
“I think it shapes students’ conversations about science, about technology, about being innovators; their language changes and they start speaking differently about it,” Green said.
The lab at Bucknell is one of several STEM and technical education workforce preparation programs that Virginia Tech offers for students across 13 school divisions in the state. The university also has a Thinkabit Lab in Roanoke that serves students in the southwestern region.
