Week 4

Literature Reflections

Reflecting on Grover's Paper

An interesting take-away from this paper is the question: “... how AI should be viewed vis-a-vis CS education.” It’s an interesting and challenging topic, should AI education and literacy still be a subfield of current K-12 CS courses? Or rather, should they be taught separately? Well, I don’t think there is an answer as of yet, and it’s something that will require more research. Since children that are non STEM can understand simple AI/ML concepts, perhaps they can be taught separately. This, I don’t think should hold true as the learners go through more advanced courses. 

Another important highlight from the paper is this: “K-12 education needs to work extra hard to address this challenge through approaches to demystify AI”. I think this is imperative. From anecdotal and research data, I have observed that children (and even adults) have a false view of AI, as mentioned in the paper, seeing it as something sentient and magical. Which those of us in the field know this is not true, there is no magic behind any of this, just a lot of smart people working together. I believe it will be of great benefit to society if young children can grasp that concept. Whether intentional or not, I noticed a reference to “Brave New World '' at the end of the paper, perhaps that’s a hint that we should really work hard to control AI and educate the future generations to do the same. 

Reflecting on "Exploring children’s attitudes toward an age-tailored AI-powered chatbot"

In regard to assessing student learning outcomes, the authors used a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. The quantitative study focused on metric and survey data that covered student engagement, and topic popularity. I am curious to know the technical aspects of gathering user interaction data from the software, as it would be beneficial to my project. 

The qualitative data was achieved by analyzing recordings of interactions and responses to open ended questions. I like this idea of open ended questions, as it gives the participant more freedom in their answers as opposed to multiple choice. The authors conducted two post surveys, the first being in interview fashion and the second a questionnaire. There are benefits to both interview and questionnaire approaches, but personally I like the interview approach better, as it allows a more conversation style survey, which is probably more friendly for the children than receiving a handout. There arises the issue of participant size and conduction of an open ended survey; however, the authors managed to do this well from 31 surveys. They did this by condensing the responses into five broad categories.

Overall, I liked the way the researchers handled assessing student learning by taking a qualitative and quantitative approach. I surely will take some aspects of this approach into my own project. 

Project GUI Prototype