NC’s AI Solve-a-Thon Proved Students Are Ready. Are We?

In this episode of Kinwise: AI Insights for Educators, host Lydia Kumar sits down with Vera Cubero and Matthew Mayo, the NC DPI leaders who designed and ran North Carolina's first-ever AI Solve-a-Thon. Together they built a statewide student competition where teams spent months identifying real community problems and building actual AI-powered solutions and what students produced exceeded every expectation. Key Takeaways for Education Leaders The Solve-a-Thon was built around empathy. Students were asked to identify real problems in their communities. AI literacy is the floor. While many schools are still debating whether to introduce AI, students are already building with it. The goal now is fluency: the discernment and human agency to use these tools responsibly. Instructional redesign is no longer optional. If the end product is indistinguishable from what AI alone could produce, it's time to start evaluating the process. When students are given real challenges, they exceed what we thought was possible. One student told his coach he had learned more in four months than in his entire school career.