Most teachers have had the experience of catching a student submitting AI-generated work that looked completely polished and was completely wrong.
Tara Altherr, a high school chemistry teacher from Arizona, opens this session with exactly that scenario: she asked an AI a question any first-semester chemistry student could answer, got a detailed, well-formatted, confident response, and the response was wrong. That’s the problem she’s designed her classroom around solving.
In this session, Tara walks through how generative AI actually works, why hallucinations happen and why they’re so hard to spot, and how to design assignments where students have no choice but to do the thinking themselves. She calls it human override, and she shows what it looks like in two real classroom activities, one built around chemistry detectives solving physical versus chemical change scenarios, and one where students are elite chemists responding to a fictional toxic train derailment in their own backyard.
If you’ve been wondering how to use AI in your classroom without handing students a very confident shortcut to not thinking, this session is worth your time.
Beyond the Bot: Turning AI into a Tool for Curiosity and Critical Thinking
Description:
AI can give your students a confident, well-formatted, completely wrong answer, and they’ll never know the difference. That’s where Tara Altherr, an 18-year classroom veteran and high school chemistry teacher from Arizona, starts this session.
Her approach is built around one idea: AI won’t replace student thinking, but only if you intentionally design against it. Tara walks through how generative AI actually works (tokens, context windows, temperature, hallucination) so teachers understand why human override isn’t optional, and then shows exactly what that looks like in a real chemistry classroom. Her AI Chemistry Detectives activity and Operation Fall Out assignment give students structured, high-stakes scenarios where the AI is the intern and the student is always the lead.
In this session, you’ll learn:
- Why AI hallucinations are dangerous in the classroom and how to help students recognize them
- The “economy of thinking” framework: computational tokens vs. thinking tokens, and how to protect the expensive ones
- Her district’s CARE framework (Clarity, Accuracy, Relevance, Ethics) for evaluating AI output
- How to design active prompts that force student thinking instead of passive prompts that let AI do the work
- Two full classroom activity examples you can adapt for your own content area
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About Tara Altherr
Tara L Altherr is a high school chemistry teacher and PLC leader in Arizona. She specializes in practical, classroom-ready AI strategies that support critical thinking and student engagement and has presented on AI integration at ISTE and AzTEA.
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