Joshua Weinberg

"This research study was done in collaboration with Pratt Institute’s Center K-12. Our project focuses on high school design educators' experimental use of Generative AI (GAI) in their teaching practice, through interviews and qualitative data analysis with 8 interdisciplinary high school design educators.

Our research questions below guided our study:
How do high school design educators tinker with GAI in their UX classes?
How might design educators using GAI during lesson delivery influence or change student learning and in-class interaction?

Key observations we identified include: 1) interactive student-to-student engagement and student-to-GAI collaborative learning; 2) modifications in brainstorming and visualization workflows with GAI; 3) concerns and barriers with the ongoing integration of GAI tools into high school curricula. Our research discusses the potential GAI tools have to reshape traditional workflows and in-class interaction, and makes recommendations for the critical adoption of GAI tools into high school design curricula. We hope that this research relates to other research covering generative AI, and provokes thought into the special considerations of adoption of GAI tools into K-12 spaces. As GAI continues to produce more of the content we interact with, the need for AI literacy–the ability to understand and make informed decisions about how we’re consuming and creating with GAI–becomes increasingly important. This need for a critical thinking framework with GAI informed our scope to research the K-12 space. We used findings from this study to inform our Spring 2025 Saturday Art School course “Exploring User Experience (UX) Design with Generative AI” at Pratt’s Center K-12. "