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Title: Artificial Intelligence Unplugged: Designing Unplugged Activities for a Conversational AI Summer Camp
As conversational AI apps such as Siri and Alexa become ubiquitous among children, the CS education community has begun leveraging this popularity as a potential opportunity to attract young learners to AI, CS, and STEM learning. However, teaching conversational AI to K-12 learners remains challenging and unexplored due in part to the abstract and complex nature of some conversational AI concepts, such as intents and training phrases. One promising approach to teaching complex topics in engaging ways is through unplugged activities, which have been shown to be highly effective in fostering CS conceptual understanding without using computers. Research efforts are underway toward developing unplugged activities for teaching AI, but few thus far have focused on conversational AI. This experience report describes the design and iterative refinement of a series of novel unplugged activities for a conversational AI summer camp for middle school learners. We discuss learner responses and lessons learned through our implementation of these unplugged activities. Our hope is that these insights support CS education researchers in making conversational AI learning more engaging and accessible to all learners.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2048480
PAR ID:
10497839
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
ISBN:
9798400704239
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1272 to 1278
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Portland OR USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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