Blog

List of Recent Blogposts published on Medium

• Generative AI as Craft Material Imagine the star trek replicator exists, and you can use it to create or replicate any object. Would you instead print ready-made things or prefer to get parts you can assemble, polish, and customize? While existing Generative AI models are the closest approximation of the replicator we currently have, their results are primarily digital and still require quite a bit of shepherding to materialize in the physical world. But already, it can be done — and we’re seeing a proliferation of tools and improvements in this space. Read more here.

• Landscape of AI Education Ressources We wanted to understand better what learning and teaching affordances existing AI resources have for supporting teaching AI and decided to create a corpus with all public AI Education Resources. We selected all existing AI Education resources from repositories and dedicated websites for computer science teachers such as CSTA, AI4K12, and MIT AI Education. From the complete list of 100 resources, we included only the ones still active and available in a final corpus of 50 resources. Read more here.

• Raising a different kind of gamers It is not a surprise that youth are spending significant time playing computer, and video games, with 97% of children ages 12–17 playing computer, web, portable, or console games. Moreover, we have witnessed significant growth in youth participation in online gaming communities such as Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite (141, 120, and 80 million monthly active players). Parents are now at an impasse, not knowing how best to mediate their children’s consumption of this new media. This motivated us to run a 4-week in-home programming workshop with families. We recruited 15 families from 10 different USA states with different technological backgrounds and levels of exposure to technology. Families did all the coding activities on TileCode, an open-sources rule-based programming platform for video-game programming that can run on low-cost arcade devices. Read more here.

• How do families learn about AI together? In our recent CHI study we set to answer the following research question: what happens when children and parents learn about AI together? To answer this question we used our prior co-design sessions with families to create 11 learning activities for family AI literacy. We invited 15 families from all over the USA to participate in a 5-week in-home study. Families spoke more than 10 languages other than English and had a variety of backgrounds and levels of exposure to smart devices. Each family got to learn more about image classification, machine learning, voice assistants and they also got to design and analyze their own AI assistants. Read more here.

• Future Tools for Youth Data Literacies What are data literacies? What should they be? How can we best support youth in developing them via future tools? On July 13th and July 15th, 2021, we held a two-day workshop at the Connected Learning Summit to explore these questions. Over the course of two very-full one-hour sessions, 40 participants from a range of backgrounds got to know each other, shared their knowledge and expertise, and engaged in brainstorming to identify important pressing questions around youth data literacies as well as promising ways to design future tools to support youth in developing them. In this blog post, we provide a full report from our workshop, links to the notes and boards we created during the workshop, and a description of how anyone can get involved in the community around youth data literacies that we have begun to build. Read more here.