No abstract

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are a compelling way to introduce K-12 students to AI education using an artistic medium, and hence have drawn attention from K-12 AI educators. Previous Creative AI curricula mainly focus on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) while paying less attention to Autoregressive Models, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), or other generative models, which have since become common in the field of generative AI. VAEs' latent-space structure and interpolation ability could effectively ground the interdisciplinary learning of AI, creative arts, and philosophy. Thus, we designed a lesson to teach high school students about VAEs. We developed a web-based game and used Plato's cave, a philosophical metaphor, to introduce how VAEs work. We used a Google Colab notebook for students to re-train VAEs with their hand-written digits to consolidate their understandings. Finally, we guided the exploration of creative VAE tools such as SketchRNN and MusicVAE to draw the connection between what they learned and real-world applications. This paper describes the lesson design and shares insights from the pilot studies with 22 students. We found that our approach was effective in teaching students about a novel AI concept.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are a compelling way to introduce K-12 students to AI education using an artistic medium, and hence have drawn attention from K-12 AI educators. Previous Creative AI curricula mainly focus on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) while paying less attention to Autoregressive Models, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), or other generative models, which have since become common in the field of generative AI. VAEs' latent-space structure and interpolation ability could effectively ground the interdisciplinary learning of AI, creative arts, and philosophy. Thus, we designed a lesson 1 to teach high school students about VAEs. We developed a web-based game and used Plato's cave, a philosophical metaphor, to introduce how VAEs work. We used a Google Colab notebook for students to re-train VAEs with their hand-written digits to consolidate their understandings. Finally, we guided the exploration of creative VAE tools such as SketchRNN and Mu-sicVAE to draw the connection between what they learned and real-world applications. This paper describes the lesson design and shares insights from the pilot studies with 22 students. We found that our approach was effective in teaching students about a novel AI concept.

The 12th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI-22, cochaired by Michael Guerzhoy and Marion Neumann) continued the AAAI/ACM SIGAI New and Future AI Educator Program to support the training of early-career university faculty, secondary school faculty, and future educators (PhD candidates or postdocs who intend a career in academia). As part of the program, awardees were asked to address one of the following "blue sky" questions: •How could/should AI courses incorporate AI Ethics into the curriculum? •How could we teach AI topics at an early undergraduate or a secondary school level? •AI has the potential for broad impact to numerous disciplines. How could we make AI education more interdisciplinary, specifically to benefit non-engineering fields? •How should standard AI courses evolve? •How could we leverage AI education to promote diversity in the field? This paper is a collection of their responses, intended to help motivate discussion around these issues in AI education.