Class of 2030: Designing AI's Place in Learning
Hosted by AI in Education (Official Student Club at Harvard University)
Saturday, October 10, 2026
1:30 PM–3:00 PM ET
About
AI arrived in classrooms before anyone decided how it should be used. Teachers are experimenting, learners are improvising, and institutions are writing policy for tools that change every few months. The result is a lot of activity and very little shared understanding of what it's actually doing to learning.
This panel brings together researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Project Zero to take stock of where AI actually shows up in K–12 and higher education today. They'll discuss what we know, and don't yet know, about its effects on how students think and learn, and how educators might design curriculum and systems where AI deepens thinking rather than replacing it. If we were designing learning for an AI-native generation from scratch, what would we change, and what should we protect?
Panelists: Tina Grotzer, Fernando Reimers, Karen Brennan
Moderator: Dan Be Kim (Project Zero)
Hosted by the AI in Education Student Club
Speakers
- Tina Grotzer is a member of the Faculty of Education at HGSE and a Principal Research Scientist at Project Zero. A cognitive and learning scientist, she directs the Cognition in a Complex World Lab and serves as Faculty Director of the Next Level Lab, which examines what it means to be an expert learner and how to prepare for work in a volatile, uncertain world. Her research on how people reason about complex causality has been recognized with an NSF Career Award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Before her research career, she spent fifteen years as a classroom teacher and district-level administrator.
- Fernando Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education at HGSE and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative. His work focuses on how education systems prepare students to thrive in the twenty-first century and how policy, leadership, and teacher development support improvement at scale. He is co-author of the book Artificial Intelligence and Education in the Global South: A Systems Approach, which examines AI's potential to transform education alongside the equity, ethical, and policy dilemmas it raises. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education.
- Karen Brennan is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies at HGSE, director of the Creative Computing Lab, and an affiliate in Computer Science. Her research focuses on the design of learning experiences in K–12 computing, including computational thinking and, more recently, the role of generative AI in programming. She advocates for constructionist approaches in which students build understanding by creating things they care about, and her new book with Sarah Blum-Smith, Start with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio (MIT Press, 2026), explores how teachers create the conditions for that kind of learning. She completed her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab as a member of the team that developed Scratch.
Host
AI in Education (Official Student Club at Harvard University)
Location
Askwith Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138
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