Developing AI Tools for Children

Assignments

Home   Meeting Notes   Student Pages   Google Drive   Assignments

Week 12

Assignments

  1. Arrive to Shavano BASIS per Meeting Notes details
  2. Bring working software
  3. Bring one paper copy of your post-interview form

 

Week 11

nothing added

 

Week 10

Assignments

Your software system should be feature-complete by class on Apr 2

  • everything you expect it to do should be implemented
  • including instrumentation for data collection
  • you will have one following week to debug
  • no new features should be added after Apr 2 – only debugging

 

Week 9

Assignments

  1. Continued work on implementation of software system, including data collection.

 

Week 8

Readings

  1. Read the paper Does Any AI-Based Activity Contribute To Develop AI Conception? A Case Study With Italian Fifth and Sixth Grade Classes.

    Write a ~250-word reflection on their approach toward assessing student learning outcomes. Post to your web site.

    We will discuss at the next class meeting.

Assignments

  1. Make revisions to your 2-pager based on conversation in class. Replace copy in assessments folder with new version (also update copy on web site). Please have ready by Sun Mar 10.

  2. Continued work on implementation of software system, including data collection.

 

Week 7

Readings

No assigned readings this week.

Assignments

  1. Create a PDF document for inclusion in our submission to the UTSA IRB as part of our approval to conduct research with students.

    The PDF should include:

    • a screenshot of your app main interface.
    • a brief description of how your app works / what students will do when they use it (50 words max)
    • a discussion of the data that your app will automatically gather during use.
    • survey items you will have students complete after use (may be delivered verbally or in written form)

    The PDF should be two pages maximum. Name it your-project-name-author1lastname-author2lastname.pdf.

    Link the PDF to your website and also upload it to the assessments folder on Google Drive.

  2. Continue work on your implementation, including starting work on the automated data gathering. Please be prepared to present in class on Tue Apr 5.

 

Week 6

Readings

No assigned readings this week.

Assignments

  1. I request that your web site has a dedicated area for the project. If you’ve presently documented the project as part of a continuous stream of assignment updates, please break it out to its own dedicated area. (TY)

    Some people do not have a project area on their web site—because their partner has it. That is fine. However, make sure there is a project menu item that links to the project area on your partner’s page.

  2. Create a detailed plan of what usage metrics your app will gather from users.

    Durga and Adrian have an exemplary plan. Please review this and use it as a model. Please also re-read Saniya’s Ask Me Anything paper for inspiration; the fine-grained data we gathered in this project were essential to our argument of research findings.

    It is not sufficient to only plan for screen-recording; your plan must be customized to your specific app. You will want semantic click data that you can interpret for meaning.

    Your app should also collect student first name, grade level, and at least one usage timestamp.

    Please have a detailed plan published on your web site for the next meeting.

  3. Write post-assessment for how you will learn about students’ understandings after using your tool.

    This can be in the form of a survey with multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and/or complete-the-sentence prompts.

    Make sure to ask for the student’s first name, grade level, and date/time of survey being filled out. This will allow you to connect the survey to the electronic usage log even if you have multiple students with the same first name and grade level.

    Please see this student work from Spr ‘23 for examples.

  4. Continue work on your project implementation.

 

Week 5

Readings

No assigned readings this week.

Assignments

  1. Start building out your project. Plan to show some kind of live demo at our next meeting.
  2. Prepare a plan for what kind of usage data your app will collect (and how it will record those data). Have this written up on your app’s area of your web site.

 

Week 4

Readings

  1. Shuchi Grover’s preprint Teaching AI in K-12 Learners: Lessons, Issues, and Guidance, a best paper SIGCSE ‘24.

  2. Saniya and Fred’s Exploring children’s attitudes toward an age-tailored AI-powered chatbot. This is a draft under review; do not quote in your own writings. But see reflection prompt below.

Assignments

  1. For the Grover paper, write a ~250-word reflection on what is most interesting / surprising about this article. This should not be a summary.

  2. For the Exploring children’s attitudes paper, write a ~250-word reflection on how they handled assessing student learning outcomes.

  3. Finish Social/Behavioral Research Course:
    • Privacy and Confidentiality
    • Conflicts of Interest in Human Subjects Research
    • two UTSA modules

    and upload certificate to our Google Drive folder.
    Modify filename to include your full name and completion date, per examples there.

  4. Make project initial prototype of GUI and development plan so that you can show some initial version on on Tue Mar 5 (during MATRIX-AI Spring School ‘24.) Post on one partner’s web site.

 

Week 3

Readings & Viewing

  1. Watch Gender Shades by Joy Boulamwini, which addresses bias in face recognition technology.

  2. Select and read two of the papers chosen by your peers last week. See more in Assignments.

Assignments

  1. The state of the art in face recognition has improved since Dr. Boulamwini’s research, owing in substantial part to the impact of her work, but the issue of bias in AI technology is still pervasive and embedded. Do a little web-searching on this and describe a few other areas of AI where bias still an issue (~250 words). Post in your Week 3 area of your web site.

  2. Per above in Readings, choose two of the papers identified by your peers that you’ll read. Then, combining with the paper you selected, write a ~500 to 750 word synthesis that compares the three papers. Please focus on papers that involve children in a study. I’m looking for similarities and differences in the research methodologies. Post on your Week 3 page.

  3. Form a team with one or two other students and develop an idea for your semester project.

    On one team member’s web site, create an area where all team members can make edits. Other member(s) of the team should link to the central site from their own sites.

    Write an initial draft of the idea, including:

    • overview of the premise;
    • which ideas in AI will be taught;
    • one or more drawings presenting the how it will look and work (e.g., it could be a storyboard with several frames indicating how users interact)
    • a description of how children will interact with the system;
    • a discussion of what data you could gather.

    In addition to surveys and interview data, make sure to consider about data that can be gathered electronically as a direct result of children’s interaction with your system.

    Consider how you will engage students in considering the ethics of AI as part of your project.

    This idea is a first draft; please consider it as open to change as you move forward.

  4. Complete the next three modules in the CITI course:

    • The Federal Regulations
    • Assessing Risk
    • Informed Consent

 

Week 2

Readings

Read the following papers. Reflection prompts are below. Papers can be found in the Google Drive papers folder.

  1. Touretzky, D., Gardner-McCune, C., Martin, F., & Seehorn, D. (2019, July). Envisioning AI for K-12: What should every child know about AI?. In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 33, No. 01, pp. 9795-9799).

  2. Vaishali Mahipal, Srija Ghosh, Ismaila Temitayo Sanusi, Ruizhe Ma, Joseph E. Gonzales, and Fred G. Martin. 2023. DoodleIt: A Novel Tool and Approach for Teaching How CNNs Perform Image Recognition. In Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE ‘23), January 30-February 3, 2023, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA 8 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3576123.3576127

  3. Williams, R., Park, H. W., & Breazeal, C. (2019, May). A is for artificial intelligence: the impact of artificial intelligence activities on young children’s perceptions of robots. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-11).

Assignments

  1. Find another paper in the space of AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science tools for K-12 learners. Claim it by posting a citation in the new #papers channel in our Discord. Upload it to the Google Drive folder. On your Week 2 web site area, write a 250-summary of the paper. Link directly to your paper from your web site. Make sure your paper hasn’t been claimed already when you choose it! (everyone must have a unique paper)

  2. Think of three concepts in AI/ML/DS you might be interested in developing a project around. Write ~250 words describing each of these three AI concepts and situating each of them in the “Five Big Ideas” themes developed by Touretsky et al. in the paper above. It’s fine if any given of your three concepts fits in multiple themes. If it makes sense to include a sketch to describe your idea, please do that. (Note: the AI4K12 Big Ideas doesn’t really have an area for data science. That’s fine—don’t worry about this if you’re interested in a data science idea.)

  3. For the Williams et al. paper on Pop-Bots, write a ~250-word reflection on how they handled assessing student learning outcomes.

  4. For the Mahipal et al. paper, write a ~250-word reflection on what is most interesting / surprising about this article. This should not be a summary.

  5. If you haven’t already completed UTSA’s IRB Human Subject Training, start it now. Create an account per files shared in Discord. Do the first three modules in the Social and Behavioral Research training:

    • Belmont Report and Its Principles
    • History and Ethical Principles
    • Defining Research with Human Subjects

Reflections are due on your web sites by 9 AM on Mon Jan 29.

 

Week 1

  1. Request to join our Google Group. You need this for access to the two papers below.
    • Join our Discord group using the info in the Google Group.

  2. Create a web site where you will keep track of your work and make it available to this class for sharing. You can either make it public or make it private but in a way that all of us in this class have access. Send me the link to your web site by 8 AM Sat Jan 19. I will add your site link to this site so we all have access to each other’s work. See last year’s class at UMass Lowell for an example.

  3. Read these two papers, available at our Google Drive folder. Post short reflections (250 words ea) on the papers on your web site. Don’t summarize. Instead, focus on what you found surprising or interesting about the papers. Post these to your web site by 8 AM Mon Jan 22.
    • Lee, I., Ali, S., Zhang, H., DiPaola, D., & Breazeal, C. (2021, March). Developing Middle School Students’ AI Literacy. In Proceedings of the 52nd ACM technical symposium on computer science education (pp. 191-197).
    • Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2020, April). What is AI literacy? Competencies and design considerations. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16).

  4. If you have not already, create an account at ChatGPT, the AI chat agent. Use it to get some ideas for ways to engage children in learning about AI. On your web site, share (1) your best ChatGPT prompt and (2) your favorite response from it, due 8 AM on Mon Jan 22.

  5. Prior to the next meeting, review the work of at least three of your classmates. Please take private notes for discussion at the next class meeting.