As a high school teacher navigating through this explosion of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) everywhere, I have started to contemplate what our country's education level will look like in the next 10 years. Students are using AI everyday to complete their assignments in school. Soon, I feel, our students will not know the actual information they are turning in assignments on, but they will certainly know how to program AI to create their assignments for them. I recently took an AI course as part of professional development for my school district and I discovered several different programs that will create a real-nice slide presentation on any topic, and you can choose your own background, in 2 minutes time. So, asking students to put together a slide presentation to demonstrate their knowledge about a particular topic is not a worthwhile assignment for the classroom any longer in the new age of Artificial Intelligence. We, the educators of the new A.I. generation are going to have to use different techniques for classroom assignments than we have in previous years. We will need to utilize assignments that can't be easily completed by A.I. alone and will require student demonstration of the knowledge obtained.
The projects in this book require active research, critical thinking, and creativity, making them resistant to AI-generated shortcuts. They also encourage students to engage deeply with the complex issues surrounding the various topics in this book while providing assignment options for all types of learners. Most of the assignments are individual assignments, however, I have also included an assortment of whole-class projects as well. An assortment of rubric styles is also utilized in these projects.