Zoe Marks received the 2025 Innovations in Teaching Award for advancing AI-enabled learning. During the 2024-25 academic year, Zoe developed a custom AI chatbot for the MPP required course, Race and Racism in the Making of the US as a Global Power. Zoe's innovative chatbot, entitled Freedom Bot (built on PingPong, an AI teaching tool developed by Professor Sharad Goel) gave students new and powerful ways to prepare for classroom debates and engage with diverse perspectives.
Specifically, Freedom Bot’s simulated debates allowed students to interact directly with the competing perspectives of key historical figures. Students began by engaging with the opposing ideas of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Moïse L’Ouverture, and Jean Jacques Dessalines on Haitian freedom and independence. And later sparred with the differing views of Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar on India’s caste system. By debating with the bot before class, students could practice constructing arguments, explore alternative viewpoints, and refine their critical thinking skills in a friendly, low-stakes environment. This deepened their understanding of complex, historically rooted issues central to the course’s themes, and enabled students to engage dynamically with course materials in a new context.
Freedom Bot’s pre-class dialogues helped students build confidence and clarity in their reasoning, which translated to greater engagement during in-class debates.
Zoe also leveraged real-time data to refine Freedom Bot. She collected student feedback and analyzed usage statistics from Haiti’s portion of Freedom Bot to refine the underlying bot prompts and framing for engagement before students interacted with Freedom Bot: India.
As one nominator noted,
“Zoe shows how curiosity and a spirit of experimentation can lead to smart interventions that center student learning.... Her willingness to examine engagement data and feedback lead the way to deeper understanding of how chatbots are used by students in HKS courses. This is cutting edge and there's not a lot of research in the field, so her findings are even more valuable and relevant.”
Zoe's collaborative approach—sharing insights and research with colleagues, and inspiring other faculty to experiment with similar approaches—has helped set the stage for broader adoption of AI in teaching at HKS. Zoe’s innovation exemplifies the ideals of iterative experimentation, inclusive pedagogy, and knowledge-sharing. Her work stands as a model for how purposeful integration of technology can generate more impactful learning experiences for HKS students.