A team led by Media Lab Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal
has launched aieducation.mit.edu to
share a variety of online activities for K-12 students to learn about
artificial intelligence, with a focus on how to design and use it responsibly.
Learning resources provided on this website can help to address the needs of
the millions of children, parents, and educators worldwide who are staying at
home due to school closures caused by Covid-19, and are looking for free
educational activities that support project-based STEM learning in an exciting
and innovative area.
The website is a collaboration between the Media Lab, MIT
Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, and MIT Open Learning, serving as a
hub to highlight diverse work by faculty, staff, and students across the MIT
community at the intersection of AI, learning, and education.
"MIT is the birthplace of Constructionism under Seymour
Papert. MIT has revolutionized how children learn computational thinking with
hugely successful platforms such as Scratch and App Inventor. Now, we are
bringing this rich tradition and deep expertise to how children learn about AI
through project-based learning that dovetails technical concepts with ethical
design and responsible use," says Breazeal.
The website will serve as a hub for MIT's latest work in
innovating learning and education in the era of AI. In addition to highlighting
research, it also features up-to-date project-based activities, learning units,
child-friendly software tools, digital interactives, and other supporting
materials, highlighting a variety of MIT-developed educational research and
collaborative outreach efforts across and beyond MIT. The site is intended for
use by students, parents, teachers, and lifelong learners alike, with resources
for children and adults at all learning levels, and with varying levels of
comfort with technology, for a range of artificial intelligence topics. The
team has also gathered a variety of external resources to explore, such as
Teachable Machines by Google, a browser-based platform that lets users train
classifiers for their own image-recognition algorithms in a user-friendly way.
In the spirit of "mens et manus"—the MIT motto,
meaning "mind and hand"—the vision of technology for learning at MIT
is about empowering and inspiring learners of all ages in the pursuit of
creative endeavors. The activities highlighted on the new website are designed
in the tradition of constructionism: learning through project-based experiences
in which learners build and share their work. The approach is also inspired by
the idea of computational action, where children can design AI-enabled
technologies to help others in their community.
"MIT has been a world leader in AI since the
1960s," says MIT professor of computer science and engineering Hal
Abelson, who has long been involved in MIT's AI research and educational
technology. "MIT's approach to making machines intelligent has always been
strongly linked with our work in K-12 education. That work is aimed at
empowering young people through computational ideas that help them understand
the world and computational actions that empower them to improve life for
themselves and their communities."
Research in computer science education and AI education
highlights the importance of having a mix of plugged and unplugged learning
approaches. Unplugged activities include kinesthetic or discussion-based
activities developed to introduce children to concepts in AI and its societal
impact without using a computer. Unplugged approaches to learning AI are found
to be especially helpful for young children. Moreover, these approaches can
also be accessible to learning environments (classrooms and homes) that have
limited access to technology.
As computers continue to automate more and more routine
tasks, inequity of education remains a key barrier to future opportunities,
where success depends increasingly on intellect, creativity, social skills, and having
specific skills and knowledge. This accelerating change raises the critical
question of how to best prepare students, from children to lifelong learners,
to be successful and to flourish in the era of AI.
It is important to help prepare a diverse and inclusive
citizenry to be responsible designers and conscientious users of AI. In that
spirit, the activities on aieducation.mit.edu range
from hands-on programming to paper prototyping, to Socratic seminars, and even
creative writing about speculative fiction. The learning units and
project-based activities are designed to be accessible to a wide audience with
different backgrounds and comfort levels with technology. A number of these
activities leverage learning about AI as a way to connect to the arts,
humanities, and social sciences, too, offering a holistic view of how AI
intersects with different interests and endeavors.
The rising ubiquity of AI affects us all, but today a
disproportionately small slice of the population has the skills or power to
decide how AI is designed or implemented; worrying consequences have been seen
in algorithmic bias and perpetuation of unjust systems. Democratizing AI
through education, starting in K-12, will help to make it more accessible and
diverse at all levels, ultimately helping to create a more inclusive, fair, and
equitable future.
