Bridging frontier AI and the classroom.
AugmentED is an R&D organization closing the gap between what AI can do and what students need. We are teachers, researchers, and engineers working together to build and test the missing technology, and the evidence to trust it.
Frontier AI models weren't purpose-built for education, leaving a gap between what AI can do and what students need. Closing it requires a missing layer between those models and the apps they power: infrastructure built for learning, proven in classrooms, and worthy of trust.
We treat AI in education as a science, not a gold rush.
We run an iterative research and development cycle, with educators, researchers, and engineers as equal partners at every step. We don’t start by asking what AI can do. We start by asking what teachers and students need. Then educators, researchers, and engineers work together to identify what’s missing, build it, and test it in real classrooms. What we learn informs the next turn of the cycle.
Define the role
AI can play many distinct roles in a classroom, and each requires its own standards, evidence, and safeguards. With each group of teachers and students, we identify a specific role AI could play to meet a real need, and what teachers uniquely bring alongside it. Then we study what that role requires, where its limits are, and what bar it must meet.
Co-design the applications
Teachers, researchers, engineers, and designers build classroom tools on those capabilities, along with new ways of teaching alongside them. They then test our work where it counts: in real classrooms.
Build the capabilities
Much of the technology needed for AI to play these roles well doesn't exist off the shelf. We build the missing layer between frontier AI models and classroom apps — validated capabilities that tools can build on, like computational methods that help AI measure student skills or track how concepts connect across a semester.
Test, learn,
begin again.
Classroom data tells us whether the AI roles we selected and the capabilities and tools we built actually helped. Those lessons sharpen our hypotheses, strengthen our capabilities and tools, and inform our next cycle of R&D.
Turning classroom experiments into reusable infrastructure.
Each co-design cycle produces more than prototypes. It creates evidence about what students need, what AI can do reliably, and what teachers need to use it well. AugmentED turns those lessons into research and technical foundations the field can trust and build on.
Better ways of thinking.
Ideas and evidence that help the field reason about AI in education: research insights on the roles AI should (and shouldn’t) play, methods for evaluating AI, and tested models for teaching and learning alongside it.
Better foundations for AI tools.
Reusable infrastructure that future classroom tools can be built on, from validated AI capabilities to the datasets that power them. We build these to generalize and recombine to serve many subjects and types of schools.
Better tools and classroom practices.
Tested classroom resources that help educators apply AI, including AI-powered applications, implementation guides, and proven methods for teaching alongside AI, all built with teachers to solve real challenges in their classrooms.
Examples of what we're building right now.
In our first cohort, teachers from several pioneering high schools worked with researchers and engineers to co-design AI-powered tools. Each project below is a work in progress—and each one feeds reusable capabilities back into a foundation that others can build on.
All three put the same AI role—AI as cognitive extender—to work. For teachers and students, the AI surfaces patterns hidden in more information than any person could track alone.
Recent Research
With our research partners, we study what each role AI can play in a classroom makes possible, where it falls short, and what we can build to push those limits. Three of our recent papers:
A repeatable method for measuring durable skills
The AI Roles for Education framework
Join us in building better foundations for AI in education.
We co-design with educators, publish what we learn, and build infrastructure for the whole field. If that’s the future of AI in education you want, come build it with us.