Developing an app to help expectant mothers with gestational diabetes find meals that fit their dietary restrictions and family budget. Watching doctors diagnose polyps with the latest artificial intelligence technology. Hearing from working lawyers about how ChatGPT and other large language models are complicating legal work.
It’s all part of typical coursework for juniors and seniors participating in Ignite, a unique career-pathway program offered in the Bentonville public schools in Arkansas.
The program, which has been around for about a decade, offers students a smorgasbord of career-connected experiences. Classes are linked to fields they are interested in and often led by teachers who worked in those industries before becoming educators. Students receive work-based learning experiences throughout, including guest speakers who work in professions central to their areas of interest, mentors, and internships.
Preparing Students for What’s Next
The pathways to college, internships, and work have changed. What does that mean for secondary education? Explore the series.
Ignite is a competitive program for Bentonville’s juniors and seniors. About 1,000 students—or roughly half the district’s 11th and 12th graders—apply for 600 available slots in one of 10 career “strands.” Each focuses on a different industry, such as technology, health care, digital media, education, or global business.
After a new version of ChatGPT was released publicly in late 2022, the program has added an AI twist, helping students understand how the technology is transforming the careers many hope to enter after high school or college.
“One of our core values at Ignite is to be responsive to industry needs. And our industry partners [are asking], ‘What are you doing on AI?’” said Jessica Imel, the former senior manager for finance and strategy at Walmart who now runs the Ignite program. Imel said Walmart, which is headquartered in Bentonville, and other Ignite workforce partners such as Arvest Bank, Mercy Hospital, Toshiba, and the Benton County Sheriff’s office have told the district, “’When we’re looking at hiring talent, they need to have some AI skills.’”
Incorporating AI into the curriculum has required extensive teacher professional development, consultation with the district’s workforce partners, and creativity, Imel said. And it looks different in each of the different career strands.
Nearly two-thirds—60 percent—of 472 educators surveyed by the Education Week Research Center this fall said their district now offers a career pathway in technology, cybersecurity, or AI.
It is unclear, however, just how many districts incorporate AI across a broad swath of career pathways the way Bentonville does.
Generative AI is so new that there’s no obvious road map for bringing lessons on how the technology works and the ethics of using it into career and technical education, or CTE, experts say.
But Bentonville’s approach looks promising, said Kyle Hartung, a senior advisor at All4Ed, a research and advocacy organization.
The district appears to be “rooting [AI literacy and instruction] in the context of occupational identity development” in a field a student is interested in, said Hartung, who based his comments on a reporter’s description of Bentonville’s work.
Hartung said that means students are likely asking questions such as: “How do people use the tools of the trade? How does it reflect the core work in their industry? And what are the questions that industry is asking about how they might use technology differently?
“That feels really important and a good source of inquiry for young people as they explore the world of work more deeply.”
Bentonville may be a national leader in putting AI literacy and instruction hand in hand with career education. But Imel still feels the district is behind the technological curve, given how fast its workforce partners are moving to expand their use of AI.
“Given what their demands are from young professionals, it’s like we are constantly playing catch up to make sure our curriculum is responsive and relevant to what they’re doing,” Imel said.
Here’s a look at how Bentonville is embedding AI across a broad range of fields.
AI use is now a critical component of the graphic design curriculum
AI design tools weren’t in the picture back when Jennifer Russell worked as a graphic designer for Walmart and other businesses.
Now, as an instructor in the Ignite program’s digital media pathway, she’s mastering the technology alongside her students.
She said she told her students at the beginning of this school year, “‘I’m not quite sure who’s going to learn more, me or you, but we’re going to learn together and we’re going to figure it out one day at a time.’”
Recently, Russell challenged students to create eye-catching images using random objects she found around her home—an assignment that harkened back to her Walmart days when she would have to create enticing graphics for specific products. She gave them the option of enhancing photographs with AI tools.
Russell was particularly struck with a graphic created by A.J. LeFever, a senior, of a toy robot appearing to prepare to hike a distant mountain. A.J. used AI tools to sub out the original background in his photo—ordinary woods—for the mountain range.
A.J. and his classmates have also learned about the ethics of using AI to revise a photo.
For instance, it would not violate industry standards to edit certain aspects of a portrait, such as “bad acne spots, fly-away hairs that [the subject] definitely wouldn’t want on their headshots,” said A.J., who is considering a career in graphic design. But it would be a bridge too far to “completely change hair color” or facial features, he said.
In today’s world, Russell isn’t sure how anyone would be able to do the kind of corporate graphic design she used to do without the help of AI.
“It’s just massive, the amount of content that’s needed for social media and the web. It just feels like it just never ends,” she said. “I don’t know that you could humanly possibly pump out as much as needed. So, AI is going to be a really good tool in helping with that workload.”
How AI helped students introduce a new product to Walmart customers
Could Walmart executives envision their customers chowing down on fried okra or cauliflower pizza bagels as they watch Sunday night football?
Four students in Ignite’s global business and public policy strands set out to tackle that question, part of a broader assignment for a business law class to create a new product for the retail giant and pitch it to a group of Walmart’s professional buyers.
The team’s vision: frozen snacks branded with the ESPN logo and marketed to sports fans looking for something healthy—or at least healthy-adjacent—to snack on during a game.
Though students brainstormed the actual product idea themselves, they used AI for some research and even production. For instance, one student asked ChatGPT for help figuring out what kind of features—including a complicated universal product code—that need to be included on packaging for Walmart products.
When the business executive who mentors that group suggested that they include pictures of real people using their products on a mock website, the teens also turned to AI. They took a picture of the box the group designed and asked Google’s Gemini, a large language model, to create an image of a family eating wings as they watch a game, with one member holding up the box.
Students in the public policy pathway also hear from both their teachers and professionals about how AI tools are already impacting legal work. For instance, AI tools are expected to replace a lot of the rote writing and research that paralegals do, freeing up time for tasks that involve more critical thinking.
Working lawyers have also cautioned students against relying too much on AI tools like ChatGPT for legal writing and research.
Students hear that “you have to be really careful with AI in this particular space, because [the tech] will make up case law,” said Aubrey Patterson, who teaches in the Ignite public policy pathway and is a member of the Bentonville City Council.
Using AI tools to help tackle some of the biggest challenges in Arkansas’ health-care system
Students in Ignite’s health-care pathway have teamed up with peers in the technology strand to come up with digital solutions for some of the most persistent public health problems facing their largely rural state.
For instance: After extensive interviews with obstetricians who shared that women in remote areas often lack access to nutrition counseling, health-care students used AI tools to create a meal-planning app for expectant mothers with gestational diabetes. The app works with blood sugar monitoring technology and gives patients a customized shopping list, based on their budget, family size, and food preferences. Another group of students created a digital doula platform for pregnant women that offers simple answers to common questions and connects patients with more complex queries to health-care professionals.
In both cases, students had to consider the drawbacks of artificial intelligence, such as its tendency to “hallucinate” or share false information, and find workarounds for those problems. For instance, the digital doula app includes disclaimers about the technology’s lack of reliability and points users to resources where they can chat with professional doulas, who provide support to women during pregnancy and labor.
“AI is not perfect, but it is there to help and not there to replace that telehealth” with real medical professionals, said Hutson Daniel, a senior.
Students have seen firsthand during their internships how AI is transforming the medical field.
One student learned how radiologists use AI to interpret x-rays, including using the technology to flag whether a patient has an unusually high amount of calcium around their heart, making them more prone to heart attacks.
Another student, Kilee Rowe, a senior, has watched medical professionals use a tool called GI genius to figure out if a patient has polyps, a small growth found in certain organs. Though the technology can find the polyps, it can’t tell whether a patient’s gastrointestinal condition like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, could complicate polyp removal. Doctors have to make that call themselves, Kilee learned.
AI is “assisting doctors, not replacing them,” Katie said. “I have seen doctors and nurses use it properly and use it to their advantage.”
Students design app to help kids who have trouble communicating feelings
Sanjay Shreeyans Javangulaa wanted to help his cousin in India who is on the autism spectrum and sometimes has trouble reading other people’s emotions or navigating social situations.
“He would laugh when it was a sad moment for everybody,” Sanjay said. “His facial expressions really made it harder for him to make friends.”
So, Sanjay and his friend Soham Shekhar—both seniors in Ignite’s technology pathway—created Pico, an animated panda bear in an app designed to help children ages 5 to 12 with austism spectrum disorder and other learning and thinking differences—navigate social situations.
The app includes a game called “emotion detective” in which kids identify a face displaying a particular feeling, say, happiness or sadness. They’ll have a discussion with Pico about a time they might have experienced that emotion. Users are then given a chance to mirror the emotion themselves, with feedback from Pico via a video camera.
The app can also help children practice social situations by instructing Pico on how to order a meal in a restaurant or handle being left out at recess. And kids can communicate directly with Pico about their feelings. For instance, if a child tells Pico they are feeling down, the character will respond with something like, “My panda heart feels that with you. It sounds like you had a really tough morning and felt very frustrated.”
Learning about emotions through an app might help kids like Sanjay’s cousin, the students believe. Unlike a person, an app is “super nonjudgemental,” Soham said. “It helps kids feel relaxed and to be able to talk to and work through different problems.”
In their research, the students read about AI’s tendency to hallucinate or go off script. They worried that could be harmful for the kids they were trying to help. That’s part of the reason the students decided their main character should be a cuddly panda.
“We decided to go with a nonhuman to make it more cartoony and to make the kids feel like it’s just a tool and not like an actual replacement to real human interaction,” Soham said.
The students’ teacher, Padmasruthy Kumari, who holds a master’s degree in technology, also warns her students not to use AI as a crutch.
“I always want their creativity,” Kumari said. “I don’t want the shortcut answer.”
To be sure, many of the students realize that the AI tools that seem cutting edge today will likely be obsolete by the time they join the workforce. But they believe simply getting the experience of puzzling through a new technology will serve them well no matter how AI develops.
“It doesn’t matter how vastly the technology changes,” said Soham. “It’s always going to be about solving different problems and being able to do that in a logical manner. Even if we get better models or different algorithms and more code bases, that problem-solving skill still would be very much essential.”
