AI + Ethics Curricula for Middle School Youth: Lessons Learned from Three Project-Based Curricula.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing many industries and becoming increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. To empower children growing up with AI to navigate society's evolving sociotechnical context, we developed three middle school AI literacy curricula: Creative AI, Dancing with AI, and How to Train Your Robot. In this paper we discuss how we leveraged three design principles-active learning, embedded ethics, and low barriers to access - to effectively engage students in learning to create and critique AI artifacts. During the summer of 2020, we recruited and trained in-service, middle school teachers from across the United States to co-instruct online workshops with students from their schools. In the workshops, a combination of hands-on unplugged and programming activities facilitated students' understanding of AI. As students explored technical concepts in tandem with ethical ones, they developed a critical lens to better grasp how AI systems work and how they impact society. We sought to meet the specified needs of students from a range of backgrounds by minimizing the prerequisite knowledge and technology resources students needed to participate. Finally, we conclude with lessons learned and design recommendations for future AI curricula, especially for K-12 in-person and virtual learning.

Integrating Ethics and Career Futures with Technical Learning to Promote AI Literacy for Middle School Students: An Exploratory Study.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) necessitates promoting AI education at the K-12 level. However, educating young learners to become AI literate citizens poses several challenges. The components of AI literacy are ill-defined and it is unclear to what extent middle school students can engage in learning about AI as a sociotechnical system with socio-political implications. In this paper we posit that students must learn three core domains of AI: technical concepts and processes, ethical and societal implications, and career futures in the AI era. This paper describes the design and implementation of the Developing AI Literacy (DAILy) workshop that aimed to integrate middle school students' learning of the three domains. We found that after the workshop, most students developed a general understanding of AI concepts and processes (e.g., supervised learning and logic systems). More importantly, they were able to identify bias, describe ways to mitigate bias in machine learning, and start to consider how AI may impact their future lives and careers. At exit, nearly half of the students explained AI as not just a technical subject, but one that has personal, career, and societal implications. Overall, this finding suggests that the approach of incorporating ethics and career futures into AI education is age appropriate and effective for developing AI literacy among middle school students. This study contributes to the field of AI Education by presenting a model of integrating ethics into the teaching of AI that is appropriate for middle school students.

Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents.

Can robots help children be more creative? In this work, we posit social robots as creativity support tools for children in collaborative interactions. Children learn creative expressions and behaviors through social interactions with others during playful and collaborative tasks, and socially emulate their peers' and teachers' creativity. Social robots have a unique ability to engage in social and emotional interactions with children that can be leveraged to foster creative expression. We focus on two types of social interactions: creativity demonstration, where the robot exhibits creative behaviors, and creativity scaffolding, where the robot poses challenges, suggests ideas, provides positive reinforcement, and asks questions to scaffold children's creativity. We situate our research in three playful and collaborative tasks - the Droodle Creativity game (that affords verbal creativity), the MagicDraw game (that affords figural creativity), and the WeDo construction task (that affords constructional creativity), that children play with Jibo, a social robot. To evaluate the efficacy of the robot's social behaviors in enhancing creative behavior and expression in children, we ran three randomized controlled trials with 169 children in the 5-10 yr old age group. In the first two tasks, the robot exhibited creativity demonstration behaviors. We found that children who interacted with the robot exhibiting high verbal creativity in the Droodle game and high figural creativity in the MagicDraw game also exhibited significantly higher creativity than a control group of participants who interacted with a robot that did not express creativity (p < 0.05*). In the WeDo construction task, children who interacted with the robot that expressed creative scaffolding behaviors (asking reflective questions, generating ideas and challenges, and providing positive reinforcement) demonstrated higher creativity than participants in the control group by expressing a greater number of ideas, more original ideas, and more varied use of available materials (p < 0.05*). We found that both creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding can be leveraged as social mechanisms for eliciting creativity in children using a social robot. From our findings, we suggest design guidelines for pedagogical tools and social agent interactions to better support children's creativity.