1/26/2026
Professor Avinash Gupta reframes AI in engineering education as a tool for cultivating curiosity and deeper inquiry, arguing that when thoughtfully designed, AI supports reflection, questioning and meaningful learning rather than simply efficiency. Through his work in ISE, including a KEEN faculty workshop and research in the HXRI Lab, he demonstrates how structured, curiosity-driven activities using AI and XR can transform both teaching practice and learner engagement. Gupta envisions a future where AI and extended reality converge to create adaptive, human-centered learning environments that make education more exploratory, reflective, and impactful.
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Beyond using artificial intelligence to simply make learning easier, Professor Avinash Gupta emphasizes its role in fostering curiosity and deeper inquiry.
"Efficiency and mastery are important in engineering education as they emphasize optimization within known problem spaces," says Gupta, Director of the Human Extended Reality Interaction (HXRI) Laboratory and Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "Curiosity, by contrast, drives learners to explore uncertainty, make connections across ideas, and ultimately create value, which is at the heart of engineering practice."
Gupta's research sits at the intersection of extended reality, artificial intelligence, and human-centric learning environments which extends from healthcare simulation to educational innovation. His approach challenges the fundamental assumption about AI in education, that these tools are primarily about making learning faster or easier.
"AI is especially powerful when it supports this process by helping students ask better questions, examine problems from multiple perspectives, and reflect on their assumptions," Gupta explains. "By organizing AI around curiosity, we create space for deeper learning where efficiency and mastery emerge naturally as outcomes, rather than being the primary goal."
Bringing Curiosity to Engineering Faculty
Early in summer 2025, Gupta contributed his expertise to a multi-day faculty development workshop hosted at Illinois titled "Enhancing Entrepreneurial Mindset Through AI," in collaboration with KEEN (the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) partners. The workshop was attended by 20 faculty members, including 17 from KEEN partner institutions such as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Michigan Tech, UW-Platteville, George Mason University, Ohio State, Colorado School of Mines and others.
The workshop brought together engineering educators to explore how generative AI can be used with the elements of the KEEN 3Cs (Curiosity, Connections, Creating Value) framework. Participants engaged in interactive sessions, collaborative design activities and follow-up virtual workshops designed to support the development of new instructional strategies and grant proposals.
The effort was led by the KEEN Instructional Catalysts, a team of Illinois faculty and staff who developed and facilitated the workshop and are continuing to support participants throughout the academic year. This group included senior director of AE3 Jay Mann, BioE professors Holly Golecki and Rebecca Reck, Jacob Henschen (CEE), Professor Abdussalam Alawini (CS), and Gupta. KEEN consultants included professors Yael Gertner (CS), Matt Goodman (MatSe), Ann Sychterz (MechSe), and Abhishek Umrawal (ECE).
On June 3, Gupta led a session titled "Curiosity with AI: Designing Curricula Focusing on Curiosity," assisted by Emre Eraslan and Dhritiman Roy, graduate students in the HXRI lab. The session focused on empowering educators to integrate AI into teaching to foster curiosity-driven learning environments.
Eraslan presenting at the 2025 KEEN Workshop
Faculty engaged in hands-on exercises including Curiosity Sprints, AI vs. Human Activities, comparative exercises where participants contrasted human-led and AI-generated solutions. The workshop combined interactive discussions with workbook-based activities to guide participants in building AI-enhanced, inquiry-based lesson plans.
Reframing AI as a Design Challenge
Gupta's approach addresses what he sees as a fundamental misconception about AI in education.
"One of the biggest misconceptions is that AI automatically undermines learning by making things 'too easy,'" he says. "The real issue isn't the presence of AI, but the absence of pedagogical structure around it. When AI is introduced without scaffolding, it can short-circuit learning."
His solution is deliberate design. "In our approach, AI is deliberately constrained and framed through activities that require comparison, reflection, and justification. By designing assignments where students must contrast AI-generated ideas with their own reasoning or critique AI outputs, we turn AI into a catalyst for deeper engagement rather than a shortcut."
For Gupta, curiosity-driven learning means "creating structured opportunities for students to ask better questions, test assumptions, and reflect on what they discover. In AI-enhanced environments, this means using AI as a thinking partner rather than a solution engine."
He emphasizes the role of metacognition: "When designed intentionally, AI supports metacognition, helping students understand not just what they are learning, but how they are thinking and why their understanding evolves over time."
What surprised him most during the workshop was the shift in faculty perspectives. "What stood out most was how quickly faculty moved beyond concerns about cheating once they experienced structured, curiosity-centered activities firsthand. Many participants initially framed AI as a risk to manage, but during the workshop, they began to see it as a design material that they can shape and harness."
He was also surprised by the universality of the approach. "I was also struck by how naturally educators from very different disciplines converged on similar strategies once curiosity became the organizing principle. That reinforced my belief that curiosity is a powerful common language across engineering fields."
Where XR Meets AI: Research That Informs Practice
Gupta's pedagogical philosophy is deeply informed by his research in the HXRI Laboratory, where he explores how extended reality and artificial intelligence can work together to create more engaging learning experiences.
"At the HXRI Lab, my research centers on how extended reality (XR), including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, can fundamentally reshape how people learn, explore, and collaborate by making complex phenomena embodied and interactive," Gupta explains.
One example is VRtual Ed, an immersive, voice-interactive virtual reality platform developed to support nursing education amid ongoing workforce and instructional capacity challenges. The system places learners inside a realistic virtual hospital—emergency rooms and patient rooms—where they engage in contextualized clinical scenarios through real-time, AI-driven nurse–patient conversations.
"By combining XR with speech-based AI that responds dynamically to learner input, the platform enables safe, repeatable practice while supporting exploration, decision-making, and reflection," he says.
The connection between his healthcare simulation work and engineering education is clear in his research philosophy. "AI plays a key complementary role by making these environments adaptive and responsive: it can personalize feedback, surface hidden insights, and act as a thinking partner that prompts reflection rather than just delivering answers. When you combine AI with XR, you get not only rich sensory immersion but also intelligent scaffolding that supports learners as they explore, question, and iterate which are nothing but the core elements of curiosity-driven learning."
Gupta completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oklahoma State University in 2021, with research focusing on human-computer interaction frameworks for extended reality training. At Illinois, he serves as Co-Principal Investigator on a multi-university NIH grant for the Center for Research and Education on Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE), investigating how virtual reality technology can foster cognitive and social engagement among aging adults. He also leads two internal grants funded by Jump Arches examining the role of VR and AI in nurse education (as examined above) and Mixed Reality in neonatal training.
Looking Forward
As AI tools become increasingly integrated into educational settings, Gupta sees significant evolution ahead.
"I see AI and XR converging into intelligent, immersive learning environments that adapt not just to what students know, but to how they explore and reason," he says. "Rather than static simulations or one-size-fits-all instruction, we'll see systems that respond to curiosity, in turn, encouraging exploration, productive struggle, and reflection." His vision is grounded in responsible innovation.
"My hope is that our research helps shape this future responsibly, by grounding technological innovation in learning science and human-centered design. Ultimately, the goal is not to make learning faster, but to make it more meaningful, engaging, and transformative."
"In both research and teaching, I see XR and AI converging to create experiences where curiosity isn't merely supported but structured as the engine of learning," Gupta reflects. "This continuum from immersive experimentation to reflective insight is what links classroom practice with long-term innovation in engineering and beyond."
Avinash Gupta is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering. He is a faculty affiliate in the Jump Simulation Center, CI-MED, teaches software and hardware engineering courses in the Masters in Health Technology program and is the Director of the Human Extended Reality Interaction Laboratory (HXRI Lab).