WASHINGTON -- In July 2019, Nathan Wang, a student at Shaker High School, walked into the Washington, D.C., office of U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko and dropped off a legislative proposal he wrote to expand artificial intelligence education in K-12 schools.Wang thought the congressman and his staff would take one look at his proposal and toss it in the heap. But to his surprise, Wang got a call from a legislative aide a month later asking for a meeting. Tonko, D-Amsterdam, turned Wang's idea into a bill and recently, members of Congress decided to add the student's idea to the nation's annual defense bill with the hope that spurring the next generation of artificial intelligence engineers would help increase national security and U.S. military strength. "Just two years ago, if you had told me that I would be writing a piece of legislation that an actual member of Congress would actually consider, I would not have believed you," said Wang, 18, a freshman at Johns Hopkins University. "I was certainly not interested in policy stuff, nor did I think I had the confidence to approach anybody on these policy issues.