CSTANJ CSPDWeek 2026

Hi, I'm Jeff Lai, and I teach Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Technologies at NVRHS at Old Tappan. I am a physics teacher by background, but I do my best to bring ISLE Physics pedagogy (i.e. iterative design, deductive-reasoning and systems thinking) into my AI classroom. My course is part AI literacy and part full-stack design. Students predict how LLM models generate outputs through a qualitative overview of ML architecture. They then get their hands full with deploying real projects: spinning up Docker containers, standing up databases and small data pipelines, pushing sites out through S3/CloudFront, and running into the messy networking and security stuff that never shows up in a tutorial. You can find blog posts that alumni have contributed to our classroom website at https://www.aiaieducation.comI'd love to swap notes with other CSTANJ folks on AI in the classroom. Feel free to reach out to my via linkedin messages or through email. I'm always excited to see what's working when teaching students to use these tools well, how you're handling AI usage policies, and which cloud credits and open source setups are actually worth the setup headache. Always happy to trade project ideas (or commiserate over a lab that worked perfectly right up until 28 kids logged in at once).