Goto

Collaborating Authors

 high school


Vaping Is 'Everywhere' in Schools--Sparking a Bathroom Surveillance Boom

WIRED

Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. The first drag from a friend's vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn't turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. "I would ask my friends who had them, 'I'm going through a lot, can I use it?'" Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. "Or'I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.'"


Why Nicholas Thompson Made a Custom GPT to Run Faster

WIRED

The Atlantic CEO's new book,, examines his complicated relationship with the sport. On this week's episode of, he talks about the ways tech is helping him become a better runner. To most of the world, Nicholas Thompson is known as an editor, an AI enthusiast, or something of a LinkedIn influencer. But the former WIRED editor in chief, who is now CEO of The Atlantic, is often better known to colleagues as . On Tuesday, Thompson is releasing . As the title suggests, it's a book about his commitment to running--Thompson runs a ridiculously fast marathon and holds the American 50K record for the 45-49 age group. Ultimately, though, the book examines the complicated relationship between the sport, Thompson, and his father, who first took him on a run when he was just 5 years old. Tech obsessives, of course, will also get their fix: includes plenty of science-backed training guidance and documents Thompson's experience training with elite Nike coaches. On this week's episode of, I talked to Thompson (who was also my first boss; he hired me as an intern at WIRED in 2008) about his book, the interplay between running and addiction, and what he thinks AI can do for runners for writers. It is a joy to be here with you at Condé Nast at WIRED. I loved coming up those elevators. I love seeing you as the editor in chief. I'm thrilled that you're here. We're going to start this conversation the way we start all of them, which is with a little warmup, some rapid-fire questions. In honor of your new book,, I'm gonna make them entirely running themed. I mean, if your listeners don't wanna hear about running Trail run or track run? Worst running injury you've ever had. The one you wish people would stop talking to you about. You only need to run a 20-miler before a marathon. What do you need to run? Why do people die at mile 20? Because they only train for [marathons] with 20-mile-runs. I generally prefer people, but then you have to schedule it. Backup sport of choice if you could never run again.


Are Kids Still Looking for Careers in Tech?

WIRED

Are Kids Still Looking for Careers in Tech? AI is changing what careers are possible for students interested in STEM subjects. WIRED spoke with five aspiring scientists to find out how they're preparing for the future. Today's high school students face an uncertain road ahead. AI is changing what skills are valued in the job market, and the Trump administration's funding cuts have stalled scientific research across disciplines.


There's a Literacy Crisis. One Classroom Solution Should Be Obvious.

Slate

You can't get better at reading until you care about a text. We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, well before it was published, we started hearing from education scholars training high school teachers, and high school teachers themselves, who had caught wind of the book through advance essays and word of mouth. They were interested in how we describe close reading, the tools we provide for teaching it, and the claim we make for its importance.


Engineering better care

MIT Technology Review

A capsule that could replace insulin shots. In Giovanni Traverso's lab, the focus is always on making life better for patients. Every Monday, more than a hundred members of Giovanni Traverso's Laboratory for Translational Engineering (L4TE) fill a large classroom at Brigham and Women's Hospital for their weekly lab meeting. With a social hour, food for everyone, and updates across disciplines from mechanical engineering to veterinary science, it's a place where a stem cell biologist might weigh in on a mechanical design, or an electrical engineer might spot a flaw in a drug delivery mechanism. And it's a place where everyone is united by the same goal: engineering new ways to deliver medicines and monitor the body to improve patient care. Traverso's weekly meetings bring together a mix of expertise that lab members say is unusual even in the most collaborative research spaces. But his lab--which includes its own veterinarian and a dedicated in vivo team--isn't built like most.


Readability Reconsidered: A Cross-Dataset Analysis of Reference-Free Metrics

Belem, Catarina G, Glenn, Parker, Samuel, Alfy, Kumar, Anoop, Liu, Daben

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic readability assessment plays a key role in ensuring effective and accessible written communication. Despite significant progress, the field is hindered by inconsistent definitions of readability and measurements that rely on surface-level text properties. In this work, we investigate the factors shaping human perceptions of readability through the analysis of 897 judgments, finding that, beyond surface-level cues, information content and topic strongly shape text comprehensibility. Furthermore, we evaluate 15 popular readability metrics across five English datasets, contrasting them with six more nuanced, model-based metrics. Our results show that four model-based metrics consistently place among the top four in rank correlations with human judgments, while the best performing traditional metric achieves an average rank of 8.6. These findings highlight a mismatch between current readability metrics and human perceptions, pointing to model-based approaches as a more promising direction.


Robot Soccer Kit: Omniwheel Tracked Soccer Robots for Education

Passault, Gregoire, Gaspard, Clement, Ly, Olivier

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Recent developments of low cost off-the-shelf programmable components, their modularity, and also rapid prototyping made educational robotics flourish, as it is accessible in most schools today. They allow to illustrate and embody theoretical problems in practical and tangible applications, and gather multidisciplinary skills. They also give a rich natural context for project-oriented pedagogy. However, most current robot kits all are limited to egocentric aspect of the robots perception. This makes it difficult to access more high-level problems involving e.g. In this paper we introduce an educational holonomous robot kit that comes with an external tracking system, which lightens the constraint on embedded systems, but allows in the same time to discover high-level aspects of robotics, otherwise unreachable. Educational robotics is a field promoting the use of robots as tools to engage learners on practical applications, problems, and sometime competitions. This approach can be backed up by constructionist and experimental learning theories. A lot of educational robotics platforms recently emerged and are now used in classrooms.


The AI Takeover of Education Is Just Getting Started

The Atlantic - Technology

Rising seniors are the last class of students who remember high school before ChatGPT. But only just barely: OpenAI's chatbot was released months into their freshman year. Ever since then, writing essays hasn't required, well, writing. By the time these students graduate next spring, they will have completed almost four full years of AI high school. Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim.


A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom

Sievers, Thomas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although innovation and the support of new technologies are much needed to ease the burden on the education system, social robots in schools to help teachers with educational tasks are rare. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) could support teachers and add an embodied social component to modern multi-modal and multi-sensory learning environments already in use. The social robot Pepper, connected to the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT, was used in a high school classroom to teach new learning content to groups of students. I tested the technical possibilities with the robot on site and asked the students about their acceptance and perceived usefulness of teaching with the help of a social robot. All participants felt that the robot's presentation of the learning material was appropriate or at least partially appropriate and that its use made sense.


Jim Acosta 'interviews' AI-generated avatar of deceased teenager promoting gun control message

FOX News

Jim Acosta and James Carville speculated whether President Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterms in his favor on "The Jim Acosta Show." Liberal journalist Jim Acosta "interviewed" the artificially animated avatar of deceased teenager Joaquin Oliver to promote a gun control message on Monday. Working with the gun control group Change the Ref, founded by Oliver's parents, Acosta had conversation on his Substack with an avatar created by the father of the son, who was killed in the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. He would have turned 25 on Monday. "I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence," Acosta asked.