One morning in April, Tracy Lowd, a social studies teacher in Miami, tried a new approach to making government policy come alive for her high school students. She used artificial intelligence chatbots to role-play American presidents.
Her class at Southwest Miami Senior High School had already read about John F. Kennedy and discussed his campaign for “new frontier” economic and social policies. Now Ms. Lowd asked two dozen 11th graders to open their laptops and type a prompt into Google’s Gemini chatbot: “Act like President Kennedy. What was the new frontier?”
The chatbot quickly spat out paragraphs of Kennedyesque text, including phrases like “my fellow Americans.”
Then Ms. Lowd asked her students to analyze whether the chatbot simulations accurately reflected the Kennedy speeches they had studied. The teenagers’ verdict: The simulations were “awkward,” “weird” and yet still credible.
“It did a very good job of impersonating J.F.K.,” said Ashley Acedo, 17.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative A.I. technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new A.I. tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date.