The Intentional Joy of Learning
When was the last time your students' faces lit up with genuine curiosity instead of grade anxiety? What if "rigor" and "joy" were not in competition but actually reinforced each other? In this session, we will experiment with simple, research-informed moves that turn routine activities into moments of choice, play, and meaning.
You will leave with concrete ways to design classes that protect intrinsic motivation, spark agency, and quietly rekindle your own love of learning along the way.
Teaching for Tomorrow
If AI can produce an answer in seconds, what do you most want your students to do with what you teach? How do we keep thinking, judgment, and growth at the center when tools are happy to do the first draft?
Together we will probe our own assumptions about expertise, examine where students are tempted to offload thinking, and practice activities that foreground metacognition, meta-skills, and productive struggle. You will co-create practical, ethical guidelines for when to automate, when to augment, and how to help students use AI as a partner in learning rather than a shortcut around it.
Mastering Modern Academia
What if your AI tools actually understood your courses, your research pipeline, and the way you like to think? How much time and cognitive space would that free for the parts of academia only you can do?
In this hands-on session, we will build and test a toolkit of custom GPTs and prompt wrappers that streamline prep and grading, and turn "end-of-chapter problems" into rich, entrepreneurial-minded tasks. Along the way, we will keep asking a key question: how can we use these tools to make our work more effective and meaningful, not just more efficient or effortless?
Building Interactive Learning with AI
What if students could do more than solve for an answer and instead explore how engineering ideas behave, connect, and matter?
In this hands-on session, we will use AI to design interactive learning modules that cultivate curiosity through exploration, build connections across concepts and systems, and support creating value by helping students apply their learning to meaningful engineering contexts. You will leave with a practical workflow, crafted prompts, and a clear starting point for building your own AI-generated module that makes learning more engaging, consequential, and student-centered.
