Diego Jofre Lieva remembers some of the language barriers he faced when he came to West Allegheny High School from Chile at the end of his freshman year.
“We took language assessments, and a lot of my peers really struggled,” said Jofre Lieva, now a senior at West Allegheny. “I also helped students from Mexico, and that gave me insight of how bad it is when people don’t know the ins and outs of the English language in education.”
So when the opportunity came to work with other high school students across the region, tasked with a challenge to use artificial intelligence to improve a problem in K-12 education, Jofre Lieva’s idea was a no-brainer.
On Thursday at the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Jofre Lieva and students from Cornell, Peters Township and South Fayette high schools presented Lexic, an AI tool that provides adaptive reading supports for students below grade levels or other needs.
Not only could the technology adjust a reading text to meet a student’s needs, it could also translate it to different languages, Jofre Lieva said. It also addresses a need: high school seniors nationwide had the worst reading scores since 1992, according to a 2024 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
West Allegheny coordinated the initiative from a $25,000 moonshot grant through Remake Learning. Other student projects were Simply Be, a tool to help students manage stress, Grade Mate, designed to support teachers with grading, therefore freeing time for student connection, Write On Cue, offering writing feedback and Altyst, personalizing Keystone and SAT test prep.
“Our superintendent said, let’s bring AI into school better and give students more of a choice,” said Katharine Roche, West Allegheny’s academic principal and director of special projects. “Let’s do a project that empowers students to drive change.”
McKenna Griffith, a Cornell senior, said her group’s project, Altyst, reviewed students’ coursework and assignments and would identify strengths and weaknesses to know where students can improve before taking important tests. The Keystone exams, for example, are a requirement to graduate from Cornell.
“If some of the projects are implemented, it can make a great impact on education,” said Griffith, 17, who will study forensic science at Waynesburg University. “It’s important to keep the human-to-human, teacher to student connection.”
Students met six times throughout the school year to brainstorm ideas and discuss projects. They also got experience learning about AI and technology careers, and worked with Carnegie Mellon University’s Chris McComb, a mechanical engineering professor. Two CMU students pursuing doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering, Jessica Ezemba and Aslan Nourghasemi, provided mentorship to the high school students.
Ezemba said the experience expanded her knowledge and understanding of AI. In education, there’s a lot of stakeholders that make decisions like principals, administration and school board members, she said.
“Schools can utilize (AI) to get rid of busy work,” she said. “It can also free up time for teachers and students to do things they want to do.”
Learning how to best utilize AI is important, said Jofre Lieva, who plans to attend Penn State Beaver and pursue a career in software engineering. The future could be “rocky,” he said.
“If there’s no education on how to use AI, or a lot of AI use, it’s definitely going to be worse,” he said. “But if it’s in a way that it’s integrated, and not for copying and for learning, that will be useful.”