Sandy, Utah — December 8, 2025
“We cannot protect them from AI, but we can teach them to use AI as a tool,” mentioned Erum Naz, a computer-technology trainer at Beehive Science and Technology Academy (BSTA), Utah’s top-ranked highschool in accordance to U.S. News & World Report 2025-2026 rankings.
Naz is pioneering AI training for center college college students in the state. When ChatGPT and related instruments reached her classroom, she realized the significance of instructing college students each the potential and pitfalls of AI. During one early lesson, she requested college students to generate a picture of their preferrred birthday utilizing AI. She did the identical and displayed her outcome to the class. “I gave prompts to create Pakistan around 1980 and show kids with paper boats,” she recalled. “There was rain, streets filled with water, kids playing in the street — and all the kids shown were boys.” The train illustrated an important lesson: AI is biased, and customers should be taught to acknowledge these biases.
Naz is amongst the few educators in Utah at the moment instructing AI. Earlier this 12 months, the Utah State Board of Education approached her to assist design a statewide curriculum. She has since been collaborating with Kristina Yamada, a CTE Education Specialist with USBE and 2022 Women Tech Education Excellence Award recipient, a group of software program engineers, and BSTA’s principal, Halis Kablan. Their curriculum, set to launch in 2026, goals to make AI literacy accessible to all center schoolers.
“Right now I’m working with a content development team on curriculum development and research collaboration,” Naz mentioned. “The focus is on helping students understand AI and use it responsibly.” Her core objective is to construct foundational AI literacy so college students could make higher selections when interacting with any AI platform.
Curriculum Highlights
The program will cowl 5 essential parts:
- Understanding AI: Students will be taught what AI is — and what it isn’t — together with the distinction between rule-based techniques, which observe preset directions, and learning-based techniques, which evolve by way of information and utilization.
- AI in the Real World: From navigation apps to healthcare and agriculture, college students will see how AI is already built-in into each day life and world techniques.
- Building AI (Without Coding): Students will experiment with creating easy AI purposes like chatbots and picture classifiers. Naz emphasizes the significance of prompting: “When you ask a human a question, you get ethical context; AI does not. The quality of the output depends heavily on how you phrase your prompt.”
- Safe and Ethical Use: Lessons will cowl information privateness, permanence of on-line content material, bias consciousness, and digital citizenship. Students be taught that AI doesn’t perceive people the approach people do, making ethics and cautious questioning important.
- Future of AI: Students will discover potential careers influenced by AI and perceive irreplaceable human expertise like empathy, moral judgment, and important considering.
Why Early AI Education Matters
Students are taught to think about the future with AI, emphasizing irreplaceable human expertise like empathy and nuanced moral judgment, and exploring AI-influenced profession prospects. In latest years, almost three-quarters of U.S. teenagers have tried AI companions — chatbots that write and speak like people — and lots of are experimenting with AI for schoolwork and artistic initiatives, although educational adoption continues to be rising.
“I realized that students are really attracted to AI,” Naz mentioned, “but they don’t always understand the consequences.” Adolescents are notably weak: the prefrontal cortex, chargeable for reasoning, planning, and impulse management, doesn’t absolutely mature till after age 25 (Harvard Medical School ). Interacting with a human-like, but non-human, technological device may be dangerous with out steering.
National tales of younger folks falling prey to AI, mixed together with her position as each trainer and dad or mum, motivated Naz to act — not solely to shield college students however to empower them. AI just isn’t going away. “It’s a good tool,” she mentioned, “but we have to develop critical thinking in our kids.”
Her curriculum equips college students with selections and moral frameworks somewhat than restrictions. “You are given the choice to do wrong or right,” Naz instructed her college students. “Your heart will tell you when you are in the wrong place. The decision is in your hands. Think ten times about ethics, because AI will not.”
BSTA’s top-ranking standing in Utah underscores the significance of this initiative. As AI turns into more and more built-in into each day life, educators like Naz are making ready the subsequent era to navigate it with talent, consciousness, and accountability.
“Erum Naz is definitely a pioneer by offering Artificial Intelligence as a middle school elective course,” mentioned Halis Kablan Ed.D, secondary college principal of Beehive Academy. “In the spring of 2024, when we were talking about elective courses for the 2024-2025 school year, she offered to teach an elective called Artificial Intelligence. When I explained to her that there were no courses, thus no standards and curriculum for the course by USBE, she committed to building the course from the ground up. Her dedication to providing students with up-to-date content is driving her passion to go to conferences to come back with great ideas. She plays an important role in expanding Beehive Academy’s STEM education mission.”
Celebrating 20 years in 2025, Beehive Science and Technology Academy (BSTA) in Sandy, Utah (2165 E 9400 S) is a tuition-free, open-enrollment public constitution college in Utah with a STEM-focused curriculum for grades Ok–12. Founded in 2005 by a bunch of students who noticed the rising demand for science, know-how, engineering, and math training, Beehive emphasizes project-based studying, hands-on experimentation, and school readiness.
The college has operated in three areas, most just lately transferring three years in the past right into a transformed Shopko constructing that now homes each the elementary and secondary applications in the identical facility, with separate begin occasions, administrative places of work, and entrances. Students obtain individualized consideration, with lecturers conducting annual house visits and permitting college students to pursue impartial initiatives tailor-made to their pursuits.
Be it by way of iPads, digital platforms like Google Classroom and Canvas, or participation in STEM competitions corresponding to Robotics, FIRST Lego League, MathCounts, and state science festivals, college students at Beehive develop vital considering, problem-solving, and computational expertise. Engineering rules are launched as early as sixth grade by way of Project Lead the Way programs, whereas highschool college students have interaction in Advanced Placement, Career and Technical Education (CTE), and concurrent enrollment applications at Salt Lake Community College.
While STEM is the central focus, Beehive additionally helps arts and extracurricular engagement, together with stage productions, guaranteeing college students graduate well-rounded and ready for faculty and profession success. The college’s mission is to domesticate accountable, succesful, and tech-savvy graduates who can thrive in a fancy, multicultural, and more and more technological society.
Learn extra at Beehive Science and Technology Academy.
Erin Dixon can’t maintain her mouth shut, verbally or on paper. She steadily splatters phrases throughout conversations, tales, poetry, and journalism. Blank stares are the typical response, particularly when she rambles about the philosophical and psychological penalties of being a Homo sapiens.
As a baby, Dixon spent most of her time studying — usually ending a Harry Potter e-book in simply two days. The phrases she devoured tumbled into her personal movie-making adventures and brief tales. At the University of Utah, learning historical Greek and Roman historical past and language sharpened her expertise for turning thought into written phrase. Even the most humdrum textbook, she found, teems with tales; each spoken and written phrase carries desire, perspective, and opinion.
After school, she coated the native authorities beat for City Journals, studying that fashionable folks aren’t so completely different from those that lived 2,000 years in the past. Governments, companies, and on a regular basis residents collide, cooperate, and, inevitably, reveal their very own tales formed by bias and expertise.
Between writing for newspapers, magazines, artists, and authorities businesses, Erin indulges her love of all issues Star Wars together with her partner, two youngsters, and their canine — as a result of even a wordsmith wants downtime in a galaxy far, far-off.
Share this text