On June 3, 2025, with sponsorship from Engineering Unleashed by KEEN, the HXRI Lab led an interactive workshop titled “Curiosity with AI: Designing Curricula Focusing on Curiosity”, aimed at engineering faculty across various universities. The session was facilitated by Professor Avinash Gupta, Director of the HXRI Lab, and focused on empowering educators to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their teaching practices to foster curiosity-driven learning environments.

The workshop combined interactive discussions with workbook-based activities designed to guide participants through building AI-enhanced, inquiry-based lesson plans. Faculty attendees engaged in hands-on exercises such as:

Curiosity Sprints: Time-boxed challenges encouraging rapid exploration and reflection.
AI vs. Human Activities: Comparative exercises where participants designed activities contrasting human and AI-generated solutions.
Curiosity Journals and Inquiry Stations: Structured prompts to promote reflective thinking and deeper inquiry during class.

Using a scaffolded approach, participants developed prompts and assignments that leverage AI not just as a tool for content delivery but as a partner in cultivating critical thinking, problem-solving, and innovation skills. Key discussions addressed the evolving role of AI as a collaborator in learning environments and strategies for gradually building students’ metacognitive skills through AI-enhanced activities.

Following the workshop, HXRI Lab member Dhritiman Roy shared real-world experiences using AI as a teaching assistant (TA). Dhritiman discussed practical strategies for incorporating AI tools into classroom management, grading, and enhancing student engagement while also reflecting on the benefits and limitations observed in practice.

The session concluded with a presentation by Emre Eraslan, who introduced the AI-Enhanced Educational Intervention Designer, a web-based application developed to assist educators in generating curiosity-driven lesson plans. The tool offers templates and suggestions for designing interactive sessions, including dynamic scenarios, AI-augmented assessments, and ethical prompts. Emre also led a discussion on ethical AI usage in educational settings, emphasizing the importance of transparency, bias mitigation, and maintaining human oversight in AI-supported learning environments.

The event showcased HXRI Lab’s continued dedication to human-centered AI innovation and its mission to equip educators with practical, forward-thinking tools that promote lifelong learning and critical inquiry in engineering education.