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Middle School students in the United States are exposed to an unprecedented number of AI-driven consumer products. This exposure demands that educators help students develop their personal understandings of these technologies to engage with them responsibly. Designing age-appropriate AI curricula for middle school students calls for collaboration and partnership between computer and learning scientists, as well as middle school teachers. Over a 3-year period, we co-designed and successfully implemented an AI education curriculum across 9 geographically and economically diverse schools, offering it to a total of 1551 students. Drawing from our analyses of the curriculum and teacher and student experiences, we propose an effective format for teaching, assessing, and implementing fundamental AI education for middle school settings in the United States. Our research also highlights the value of empowering teachers through co-design; enriching their professional development and improving students’ AI literacy. 

The time for battery-free computing is now. Lithium mining depletes and pollutes local water supplies and dead batteries in landfills leak toxic metals into the ground. Battery-free devices represent a probable future for sustainable ubiquitous computing and we will need many more new devices and programmers to bring that future into reality. Yet, energy harvesting and battery-free devices that frequently fail are challenging to program. The maker movement has organically developed a considerable variety of platforms to prototype and program ubiquitous sensing and computing devices, but only a few have been modified to be usable with energy harvesting and to hide those pesky power failures that are the norm from variable energy availability (platforms like Microsoft's Makecode and AdaFruit's CircuitPython). Many platforms, especially Arduino (the first and most famous maker platform), do not support energy harvesting devices and intermittent computing. To bridge this gap and lay a strong foundation for potential new platforms for maker programming, we build a tool called BOOTHAMMER: a lightweight assembly re-writer for ARM Thumb. BOOTHAMMER analyzes and rewrites the low-level assembly to insert careful checkpoint and restore operations to enable programs to persist through power failures. The approach is easily insertable in existing toolchains and is general-purpose enough to be resilient to future platforms and devices/chipsets. We close the loop with the user by designing a small set of program annotations that any maker coder can use to provide extra information to this low-level tool that will significantly increase checkpoint efficiency and resolution. These optional extensions represent a way to include the user in decision-making about energy harvesting while ensuring the tool supports existing platforms. We conduct an extensive evaluation using various program benchmarks with Arduino as our chosen evaluation platform. We also demonstrate the usability of this approach by evaluating BOOTHAMMER with a user study and show that makers feel very confident in their ability to write intermittent computing programs using this tool. With this new tool, we enable maker hardware and software for sustainable, energy-harvesting-based computing for all. 

Hawaiian bilingual language immersion (Kaiapuni) schools infuse curricula with place-based education to increase student connection to culture. However, stand-in teachers often lack the background and tools needed to support immersion learning, resulting in discontinuity for students in their culturally relevant education. This experience report describes a partnership between the Ka Moamoa Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Ke Kula Kaiapuni 'O Pu'ohala School to design a teacher-substitute support platform via a hybrid of assets-based design methodology and emerging technology capabilities. We share insights offered by teachers and design requirements for such a platform. We also reflect on how HCI methodologies should adapt to center and respect Native Hawaiian perspectives.