Sessions

Explore the 2025 TGIF Sessions

Get ready for hands-on, thought-provoking, and collaborative sessions designed to spark real conversation - not lectures. Every session is built to be interactive, participatory, and focused on co-creating solutions for a future shaped by AI, automation, and evolving workforce needs.

Whether you're an educator, industry professional, policymaker, or entrepreneur, you’ll find sessions that challenge assumptions, deepen understanding, and move ideas into action.

Check back soon...more sessions are being added regularly!

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Does AI Kill Creativity? A Call to Protect Human Critical Thinking

As AI becomes more integrated into education, we must ask whether we’re sacrificing the cognitive challenges that build critical thinking and creativity. This session explores the risks of AI-driven shortcuts that bypass the “productive struggle” of learning. Through real-world examples and strategies, participants will explore how to use AI as a tool — without losing the benefits of trial, error, and discovery that shape human ingenuity.

Attendee Takeaways:

Understand how over-reliance on AI can undermine deep learning
Learn why the “productive struggle” is essential to building creativity and resilience
Discover strategies for integrating AI without replacing experiential learning
Explore instructional methods that preserve student agency and critical thought

Education and Innovation: Redefining Learning Tools for Manufacturing Training

This interactive design thinking workshop explores how to reimagine and integrate hands-on and online training for manufacturing jobs in a digital education landscape. Attendees will collaborate to identify training challenges and develop creative, technology-enhanced solutions — especially around the use of AI — to personalize learning and bridge the gap between virtual and practical environments.

Attendee Takeaways:

Insights into the challenges and opportunities of blended online and hands-on learning in manufacturing training
Practice using design thinking to develop user-centered workforce training solutions
Ideas for integrating emerging technologies like AI into training programs to improve engagement, efficiency, and outcomes
A crowd-sourced set of tech tools and innovations to support manufacturing skill development
Actionable concepts to enhance or expand current training efforts

Future-Ready Learning: Building the PHorge Academy Model Inside a Public High School

This session explores the PHorge Academy model — an innovation hub built within a public high school that uses project-based learning and real-world challenges to teach leadership, adaptability, and AI-era skills. Learn how this student-centered model prepares learners to thrive in a fast-changing workforce, and how districts can launch similar efforts.

Attendee Takeaways:

Strategies to design and launch innovation academies in public schools
Templates for building pathways in AI, CTE, entrepreneurship, and tech
Tools to elevate student voice and agency in learning
Roadmaps to align education with regional workforce needs
Examples of student-led ventures and how PHorge ties into district-wide innovation efforts

Hybrid Intelligence: What It Is and How You Can Cultivate It

“Hybrid Intelligence” is the fusion of human creativity and machine intelligence. In this session, participants will learn how to design AI-integrated learning environments that preserve human agency and ethics. With frameworks and best practices, educators and leaders will walk away with a clearer understanding of how to empower learners to use AI confidently — without compromising creativity or autonomy.

Attendee Takeaways:

Understand the unique strengths of human and AI collaboration
Learn to design programs that enhance learning through AI, not replace it
Explore methods to maintain ethics, transparency, and learner agency
Access a toolkit for navigating cultural and structural shifts in AI integration

Immersive Technologies: Strategies for Digital Twins and Workforce Development

Immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality are often dismissed as premature or impractical—but that’s changing fast. This session challenges assumptions and explores how mixed reality, digital twins, and AI can close workforce gaps and preserve institutional knowledge. Through interactive storyboarding and real-world examples, attendees will rethink the role of immersive tech in workforce development.

Attendee Takeaways:

Gain an overview of current VR/AR and mixed reality technologies
Understand how immersive tech is already reshaping industries
Identify and overcome mental models or biases limiting tech adoption
Collaboratively design workforce solutions using immersive tech and digital twins
Leave with shareable images/videos to continue collaborative brainstorming

Innovation Beyond Specifications

As robotics technology rapidly advances, innovation must go beyond the machine itself. This session explores how to align product development with market strategy and customer value using a design-thinking approach. Through real-world examples, attendees will consider multiple dimensions of innovation that influence successful adoption and long-term impact.

Attendee Takeaways:

An understanding of how engineering, market demands, and strategic alignment intersect
Tools to evaluate opportunities for broader impact beyond the product
Insights into generating meaningful user feedback (beyond surveys)
A framework for expanding innovation across different areas of value creation

Sessions

Explore the 2025 TGIF Sessions

Does AI Kill Creativity? A Call to Protect Human Critical Thinking

Education and Innovation: Redefining Learning Tools for Manufacturing Training

Future-Ready Learning: Building the PHorge Academy Model Inside a Public High School

Hybrid Intelligence: What It Is and How You Can Cultivate It

Immersive Technologies: Strategies for Digital Twins and Workforce Development

Innovation Beyond Specifications

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