Contextualized Air Quality Timelines (ContAQT) is an air pollution data platform to visualize local AQI values over time and teach users about the multiple pollutants measured in air quality ratings. The ContAQT platform is part of our AQI Data Literacy project.
Although artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly large role in mediating human activities, most education about what AI is and how it works is restricted to computer science courses. This research is a collaboration between the TILES lab, the Expressive Machinery Lab (Dr. Brian Magerko, Georgia Tech), and the Creative Interfaces Research + Design Studio (Dr. Duri Long, Northwestern University) to create a set of museum exhibits aimed at teaching fundamental AI concepts to the public. In particular we aim to reach middle school girls and students from groups who are underrepresented in computer science.
Data Bites asks visitors to build their own training datasets to teach an AI to classify pizzas and sandwiches. After collaboratively building various labeled examples of pizzas and sandwiches using tangible pieces, learners can see how well their classification algorithm is able to distinguish between the two food items.
This 4-year project is funded by the NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program (NSF DRL #2214463). We are collaborating with the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago to conduct focus groups, needs assessments, and pilot testing of exhibit designs based off our prior work.
Knowledge Net asks learners to create semantic networks to collaboratively build up to 4 different characters in a virtual world. Characters’ appearances, likes, dislikes, and abilities can be customized which results in different interactions with the world and other characters.
This research explores how embodiment and co-creativity can help learners make sense of and engage with AI concepts.
Publications
Kafai, Y. B., Proctor, C., Cai, S., Castro, F., Delaney, V., DesPortes, K., Hoadley, C., Lee, V. R., Long, D., Magerko, B., Roberts, J., Shapiro, B. R., Tseng, T., Zhong, V., & Rosé, C. P. (2024). What Does it Mean to be Literate in the Time of AI? Different Perspectives on Learning and Teaching AI Literacies in K-12 Education. In Lindgren, R., Asino, T. I., Kyza, E. A., Looi, C. K., Keifert, D. T., & Suárez, E. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences – ICLS 2024 (pp. 1856-1862). International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/10828
Yasmine Belghith, Atefeh Mahdavi Goloujeh, Brian Magerko, Duri Long, Tom Mcklin, and Jessica Roberts. 2024. Testing, Socializing, Exploring: Characterizing Middle Schoolers’ Approaches to and Conceptions of ChatGPT. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 276, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642332
Students are expected to learn how to make inferences in the third grade, but few high-quality resources are available to help students master this skill. Frequently it is practiced by giving students pictures and asking them to infer something about the picture (for example, from a photo of children standing in front of bicycles at a beach, a student could infer that it’s summertime, that they are siblings, that they rode their bikes to the beach, etc.). Teachers evaluate the inferences based on whether or not they are plausible, but often students are left to make up a set of disconnected inferences. FossilVR is a novel virtual environment that grounds the skill of making inferences in an authentic context: a paleontological fossil dig.
Students travel through the virtual environment with Dr. Hannah, the lead paleontologist at the site, and dig up fossils, about which they are then asked to make observations and inferences in their field notebook. The notebook contains scaffolds to guide noticing to help students create an argument about the characteristics of the specimen. We hypothesize that this system will increase the quality of inferences made, support argumentation skills, and create a more enjoyable learning experience compared with traditional methods.
Publications
Roberts, J., & Leinart, K. (2022) How Big was a Triceratops, Really? Using Augmented Reality to Support Collaborative Reasoning about Scale. In Tissenbaum et al. Learning at the intersection of physical spaces and technology. Symposium to be conducted at the 2022 International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Hiroshima, Japan and online.
Video introduction presented at CSCL Physical Spaces Symposium
