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Title: A Socially Relevant Focused AI Curriculum Designed for Female High School Students
Historically, female students have shown low interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula have failed to address the lack of female-centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life applications. Our new summer camp curriculum introduces the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and other real-world subjects to engage high school girls in computing by connecting lessons to relevant and cutting edge technologies. Topics range from social media bots, sentiment of natural language in different media, and the role of AI in criminal justice, and focus on programming activities in the NetsBlox and Python programming languages. Summer camp teachers were prepared in a week-long pedagogy and peer-teaching centered professional development program where they concurrently learned and practiced teaching the curriculum to one another. Then, pairs of teachers led students in learning through hands-on AI and ML activities in a half-day, two-week summer camp. In this paper, we discuss the curriculum development and implementation, as well as survey feedback from both teachers and students.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1949472 1949492 1949488
NSF-PAR ID:
10408425
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume:
36
Issue:
11
ISSN:
2159-5399
Page Range / eLocation ID:
12698 to 12705
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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