NSF Renews $20 Million EngageAI Grant for K-12 STEM Research Through 2031

The National Science Foundation has renewed a $20 million award for EngageAI, giving the K-12 learning research institute another five years to develop AI-powered STEM lessons designed to adapt to individual students. The renewal carries the work through 2031, moving the project toward systems that retain context across a school year instead of responding only to a single exercise.

The award goes to NC State University, where the AI Institute for Engaged Learning is based. Its partners include UNC-Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt University, Indiana University and the nonprofit Digital Promise. The new grant renews the previous five-year, $20 million award that established the institute in 2021.

The goal is a learning system that accumulates context

EngageAI’s central technical ambition is not simply to generate an educational story or answer a question. Researchers plan a self-improving system that adapts to students in real time and gets better over the course of the school year as it works with them, according to James Lester, the project’s principal investigator at NC State.

That design depends on preserving progress, then using it to adjust later instruction. UNC-Chapel Hill describes the next phase as AI-powered lessons that can adapt to each student, retain progress throughout the year and help teachers create classroom learning experiences using 3D storytelling world models.

$20 millionNew NSF award

The new five-year award renews the institute’s original $20 million grant.

Through 2031Research extension

UNC-Chapel Hill says the renewal extends EngageAI’s work through 2031.

Narrative generation is only part of the plan

The institute plans to use emerging world-model AI technologies for narrative generation. In this setting, the proposed use is storytelling: creating interactive narratives that can be tailored to a classroom, rather than treating a general chatbot as the lesson itself.

The project also plans to expand ways for teachers and students to author the narratives generated by the technology. Wookhee Min, the institute’s managing director, calls this agency-centered learning: a principle intended to help students feel empowered and have ownership over the learning process.

The renewal builds on classroom research, not a finished product

During its first five years, EngageAI developed narrative-centered learning environments, ran classroom studies of AI-supported collaborative learning and created tools for examining how groups learn. Lester said those studies investigated whether AI-generated supports made a meaningful difference for students, particularly when they learned together.

UNC researchers also developed EngageVP, a framework that uses AI to analyze video, speech and gesture data captured while students solve problems in groups. The renewed funding supports planned research directions, not a completed classroom product or demonstrated learning result.