Sep 24, 2026 · 39 min · 11 segments
Charlotte Duncan has been teaching AI since 2018 — before most people knew they should care. She wrote the first AI course in North Carolina. She helped build the first national K-12 AI guidelines…
Jeff PedowitzHost
So, I mean, there's been a lot of arguments on the yin and yang of this, I'd love your take, but where does AI hurt the learning and educational process and where can it make it much better or help it excel?
Yeah, it definitely hurts if a kid takes your homework assignment and copies it and submits that, right? That's a negative use.
And the students who are most tempted to do that are those who can least afford to do it.
Every single kid can grab their phone, grab their school computer, hack their way beyond the guardrails of that computer and get that answer.
And so it's our responsibility to help students move beyond that paradigm, give them assignments that are more engaging, that have different delivery modes, or those ethical conversations over and over about AI use so that they can become empowered ethical citizens.
Is ethics something that you're born with, something that you learned, a load of the both?
And, you know, that's a lovely thing, right? That's a really lovely thing to know that that's what you value and then to structure some of your time around that.
And when you know your values, you can then make decisions and have conversations as a family about that.
So should we sign up for that AI bootcamp? Does it fit in those values? Kind, creative, persistent, joyful, healthy.
This will help me to be a kind citizen by understanding and building technologies that help others.
And so you can have that same conversation once you know your values and you can embed those ethics into like, what kinds of systems do we want to build? Our curriculum has an ethics lesson every single half hour.
We're wanting to have those conversations, which is why we have mentors in a very low ratio so that students are having those conversations with adults.
So, I mean, there's been a lot of arguments on the yin and yang of this, I'd love your take, but where does AI hurt the learning and educational process and where can it make it much better or help it excel?
Yeah, it definitely hurts if a kid takes your homework assignment and copies it and submits that, right? That's a negative use.
And the students who are most tempted to do that are those who can least afford to do it.
Every single kid can grab their phone, grab their school computer, hack their way beyond the guardrails of that computer and get that answer.
And so it's our responsibility to help students move beyond that paradigm, give them assignments that are more engaging, that have different delivery modes, or those ethical conversations over and over about AI use so that they can become empowered ethical citizens.
Is ethics something that you're born with, something that you learned, a load of the both?
And, you know, that's a lovely thing, right? That's a really lovely thing to know that that's what you value and then to structure some of your time around that.
And when you know your values, you can then make decisions and have conversations as a family about that.
So should we sign up for that AI bootcamp? Does it fit in those values? Kind, creative, persistent, joyful, healthy.
This will help me to be a kind citizen by understanding and building technologies that help others.
And so you can have that same conversation once you know your values and you can embed those ethics into like, what kinds of systems do we want to build? Our curriculum has an ethics lesson every single half hour.
We're wanting to have those conversations, which is why we have mentors in a very low ratio so that students are having those conversations with adults.
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