Author: Andrew Whitacre | RAISE Initiative<\/p>\n
This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to dive into a question that is, so far, outpacing answers: How can education still create opportunities for all when digital literacy is no longer enough \u2014 a world in which students now need to have AI fluency?<\/p>\n
The\u00a0AI + Education Summit<\/a> was hosted by the\u00a0MIT RAISE Initiative<\/a> (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor\u2019s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an onsite \u201cHack the Climate\u201d hackathon, where teams of beginner and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app for fighting climate change.<\/p>\n In opening remarks<\/a>, RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized what new goals for AI fluency look like. \u201cEducation is not just about learning facts,\u201d Klopfer said. \u201cEducation is a whole developmental process. And we need to think about how we support teachers in being more effective. Teachers must be part of the AI conversation.\u201d Abelson highlighted the empowerment aspect of computational action, namely its immediate impact, that \u201cwhat\u2019s different than in the decades of people teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right\u00a0now.\u201d And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, touched upon AI-supported learning, including the imperative to use technology like classroom robot companions as something supplementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for one another. Or as\u00a0Breazeal underlined in her talk<\/a>: \u201cWe really want people to understand, in an appropriate way, how AI works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice of how AI should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all kinds of people around the world to be able to use AI, harness AI, to solve the important problems of their communities.\u201d<\/p>\n The summit featured the invited winners<\/a> of the\u00a0Global AI Hackathon<\/a>. Prizes were awarded for apps in two tracks: climate and sustainability, and health and wellness. Winning projects addressed issues like\u00a0sign-language-to-audio translation<\/a>, moving object detection for the vision impaired, empathy practice using interactions with AI characters, and personal health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demos for MIT App Inventor, a \u201cplayground\u201d for the\u00a0Personal Robots Group<\/a>\u2019s social robots, and an educator professional development session on responsible AI.<\/p>\n By convening people of so many ages, professional backgrounds, and geographies, organizers were able to foreground a unique mix of ideas for participants to take back home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of implementing AI in school settings, such as extracurricular clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments in the United Arab Emirates and India. And plenary speakers tackled\u00a0funding AI in education<\/a>, state government\u2019s role in supporting its adoption, and \u2014 in the\u00a0summit\u2019s keynote speech<\/a> by Microsoft\u2019s principal director of AI and machine learning engineering Francesca Lazzeri \u2014 the opportunities and challenges of the use of generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of tool kits that enact safeguards around principles like fairness, security, and transparency. \u201cI truly believe that learning generative AI is not just about computer science students,\u201d Lazzeri said. \u201cIt\u2019s about all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Trailblazing AI education from MIT<\/strong><\/p>\n Critical to early AI education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longtime collaborator that helped MIT deploy\u00a0computational action<\/a> and project-based learning years before AI was even a widespread pedagogical challenge.\u00a0A summit panel discussed the history of its CoolThink project<\/a>, which brought such learning to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot and then met the ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said that the trust, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong did not want to add a burden to teachers and students of another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted \u201cto mainstream it into our educational system so that every child would have equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n MIT worked as a collaborator from CoolThink\u2019s start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the ground. Several summit attendees and\u00a0former MIT research staff members were leaders in the project development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed the MIT team\u2019s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher professional development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor\u2019s education and business development manager, was the main curriculum developer for the initial phase of CoolThink, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for the three levels in the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the development of the project\u2019s research design and theoretical grounding. Among other key tasks, they ran the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.<\/p>\n The ethical demands of today\u2019s AI \u201cfunhouse mirror\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing,\u00a0delivered the closing keynote<\/a>. He described the current state of AI as a \u201cfunhouse mirror\u201d that \u201cdistorts the world around us\u201d and framed it as yet another technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to find its positive, empowering uses that complement our intelligence but also to mitigate its risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the areas I\u2019m most excited about personally,\u201d Huttenlocher said, \u201cis people learning\u00a0from AI,\u201d with AI discovering solutions that people had not yet come upon on their own. As so much of the summit demonstrated, AI and education is something that must happen in collaboration. \u201c[AI] is not human intellect. This is not human judgment. This is something different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"