Miami Schools Use A.I. Chatbots to Bring History to Life
In a Miami high school classroom, students recently experienced a new approach to learning about government policy. Teacher Tracy Lowd used artificial intelligence chatbots to help her 11th-grade social studies students better understand John F. Kennedy’s ‘new frontier’ economic and social policies.
The students had already read about Kennedy and discussed his campaign promises. Now, they were asked to type a prompt into Google’s Gemini chatbot: “Act like President Kennedy. What was the new frontier?” The chatbot quickly generated paragraphs in the style of Kennedy, including phrases like “my fellow Americans.”
After analyzing the chatbot’s responses, the students concluded that while the simulations were “awkward” and “weird,” they were still credible. “It did a very good job of impersonating J.F.K.,” said 17-year-old Ashley Acedo.
This experiment is part of a larger initiative by Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, to integrate generative A.I. technologies into teaching and learning. Over the past year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new A.I. tools and is now introducing Google chatbots to over 105,000 high school students – the largest deployment of its kind in a U.S. school district to date.
