How Professor Sarita Singh Balances AI in the Classroom

Sarita Singh loves to learn. It’s a passion that shapes every area of her life, from her five degrees, to her globe-spanning teaching career, to her ongoing research into Education Technology, Cybersecurity, and Internet of Things. As computer science education grapples with new questions raised by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Singh’s blend of deep expertise, open-minded curiosity, and genuine love for the act of learning is helping her to engage her students with new tools in intentional ways.

“I believe one of the key reasons I have been drawn to the teaching profession is that it is a field where learning never stops. As an educator, you are constantly learning and evolving.” said Singh, an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in Seattle “I also encourage students to believe in lifelong learning; what better way than to be an example yourself? I strongly believe that it will be crucial for everyone to be a ‘lifelong learner’ moving forward.”

Recognizing the growing role of artificial intelligence in software development, Singh prepares students in her Foundations of Software Engineering and Computer Programming courses for a future in which AI coding tools are an integral part of professional work in the software industry. But rather than introducing the tools immediately, Singh spends the first months teaching her students to code by hand and building up a bank of problems they have solved themselves. Late in the semester, she brings the same problem set back – this time, with AI.

“Students noted where they had done edge case testing, exceptional handling when we were writing the program, but the chosen AI tool did not. That was a good learning experience, because the students realized the limitations of the tool, they learned how to improve the prompt and to look for a specific output,” Singh said. “It is very important that you are able to distinguish whether the model-generated code is good or bad – you have to be able to make that distinction.”

Singh explores education technologies in other ways too – creating animations to concretize abstract concepts, Kahoot-based quizzes to gamify assessments, and even experimenting with course-specific LLM chatbots to help students explore concepts more independently. At the same time, she is careful to avoid the impression that every learning challenge can be solved through the use of technology. For example, her higher-level courses often include some role-playing, such as for a hospital-based case study where students learn the communication skills and techniques to grasp a variety of competing needs.

“We are applying technology in every domain, and having a good understanding of that domain and its key workflows will help you to apply technology better.”

“You have the technicians, the front desk receptionists, the doctors, and each of them interacts with the hospital management system in a different way. How do you elicit requirements from such a diverse group of stakeholders?” Singh asked. “We are applying technology in every domain, and having a good understanding of that domain and its key workflows will help you to apply technology better.”

If the more hardware-focused modules in Singh’s courses are where a student shines, she might encourage them to join her Intelligent Automation Research Group. The team works mainly on projects related to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and healthcare for an aging population, crafting tools that track Parkinson’s tremors and support independent mobility exercises for elderly patients. All three of their spring ‘26 papers were accepted to Seattle’s IEEE AIIoT 2026 conference.

But if education technology is Singh’s passion, her first love will always be cybersecurity. “Cybersecurity requires in depth interdisciplinary knowledge, and I continue to be fascinated by this field,” she said. “Especially in the age of AI, cybersecurity has even become more critical. AI is this double-edged sword; on one side, it can automate routine tasks like vulnerability scanning, monitoring logs, or detecting threats… at the same time, it expands the attack surface. While it assists a security professional in identifying and patching vulnerability quickly, it can also help the hacker in exploiting that vulnerability.”

She strongly encourages students interested in computer science to consider exploring the field of cybersecurity, and assures them that if they decide to take up the challenge, she will be supporting them every step of the way. “It takes hard work, dedication, and sustained effort. But when you are truly passionate about what you do, there are no limits to what you can achieve,” she said.

As her students pursue diverse paths in computer science, Singh is delighted and proud to be a part of their journey. “The biggest passion is just the love for learning, and being able to share knowledge,” Singh said. “It’s seeing the sense of immense satisfaction on the face of a student who says ‘hey, I did learn something today, this has benefited me, I enjoyed this.’ That has always been the goal.”

By: Madelaine Millar