Dear friends,
I hope we can empower everyone to build with AI. Starting from K-12, we should teach every student AI enabled coding, since this will enable them to become more productive and more empowered adults. But there is a huge shortage of computer science (CS) teachers. I recently spoke with high school basketball coach Kyle Creasy, who graduated with a B.A. in Physical Education in 2023. Until two years ago, he had never written a line of Python. Now — with help from AI — he not only writes code, he also teaches CS. I found Kyle’s story inspiring as a model for scaling up CS education in the primary- and secondary-school levels.
Kyle’s success has been with the support of Kira Learning (an AI Fund portfolio company), whose founders Andrea Pasinetti and Jagriti Agrawal have created a compelling vision for CS education. In K-12 classrooms, teachers play a huge social-emotional support role, for example, encouraging students and helping them when they stumble. In addition, they are expected to be subject-matter experts who can deliver the content needed for their subject. Kira Learning uses digital content delivery — educational videos, autograded quizzes, and AI-enabled chatbots to answer students' questions but without giving away homework answers — so the teacher can focus on social-emotional support. While these are still early days, it appears to be working!
A key to making this possible is the hyperpersonalization that is now possible with AI (in contrast to the older idea of the flipped classroom, which had limited adoption). For example, when assigned a problem in an online coding environment, if a student writes this buggy line of Python code
best_$alty_snack = 'potato chips'
Kira Learning’s AI system can spot the problem and directly tell the teacher that $ is an invalid character in a variable name. It can also suggest a specific question for the teacher to ask the student to help get them unstuck, like “Can you identify what characters are allowed in variable names?” Whereas AI can directly deliver personalized advice to students, the fact that it is now helping teachers also deliver personalized support will really help in K-12.
Additionally, agentic workflows can automate a lot of teachers’ repetitive tasks. For example, when designing a curriculum, it’s time-consuming to align the content to educational standards (such as the Common Core in the United States, or the AP CS standard for many CS classes). Having an AI system carry out tasks like these is already proving helpful for teachers.
Since learning to code, Kyle has built many pieces of software. He proudly showed me an analysis he generated in matplotlib of his basketball players’ attempts to shoot three-pointers (shown above), which in turn is affecting the team’s strategy on the court. One lesson is clear: When a basketball coach learns to code, they become a better basketball coach!
I talked about Kyle (and other topics) at the ASU+GSV Summit on education. You can see a video here.
In the future, people who know how to code and build with AI will be much more productive than people who don’t. I’m excited about how AI will lead to new models for K-12 education. By delivering CS education to everyone, I hope that in the future, everyone will be able to build with AI.
Keep learning!
Andrew