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There is growing awareness of the central role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays now and in children's futures. This has led to increasing interest in engaging K-12 students in AI education to promote their understanding of AI concepts and practices. Leveraging principles from problem-based pedagogies and game-based learning, our approach integrates AI education into a set of unplugged activities and a game-based learning environment. In this work, we describe outcomes from our efforts to co design problem-based AI curriculum with elementary school teachers.
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Unplugged K-12 AI Learning: Exploring Representation and Reasoning with a Facial Recognition Game
With the growing prevalence of AI, the need for K-12 AI education is becoming more crucial, which is prompting active research in developing engaging and age-appropriate AI learning activities. Efforts are underway, such as those by the AI4K12 initiative, to establish guidelines for organizing K- 12 AI education; however, effective instructional resources are needed by educators. In this paper, we describe our work to design, develop, and implement an unplugged activity centered on facial recognition technology for middle school students. Facial recognition is integrated into a wide range of applications throughout daily life, which makes it a familiar and engaging tool for students and an effective medium for conveying AI concepts. Our unplugged activity, “Guess Whose Face,” is designed as a board game that focuses on Representation and Reasoning from AI4K12’s 5 Big Ideas in AI. The game is crafted to enable students to develop AI competencies naturally through physical interaction. In the game, one student uses tracing paper to extract facial features from a familiar face shown on a card, such as a cartoon character or celebrity, and then other students try to guess the identity of the hidden face. We discuss details of the game, its iterative refinement, and initial findings from piloting the activity during a summer camp for rural middle school students.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2148680
- PAR ID:
- 10500141
- Publisher / Repository:
- AAAI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 23285 to 23293
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i21.30376
