Museum Exhibits to Foster AI Literacy
About
Team: Sophie Rollins, Hasti DarabiPourshiraz, Shannon Sauhee Han, Grace Wang, Dev Ambani, Nyssa Shahdadpuri
This project engages middle-school age youth in learning about AI through interaction with museum exhibits in science and technology centers. The exhibits employ embodied interactions and creative making activities. We are exploring two key research questions: 1) How can the design of interactive museum exhibits encourage interest development in and learning about AI among learners without a computer science background by using embodiment and creative making? and 2) How do embodied interaction and creative making mediate learning about AI in informal learning environments?
We are engaged in an iterative design-based research process in which we are developing three exhibit prototypes, described below. This project is in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech (in the Expressive Machinery Lab and TILES Lab) and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.
Grant
Award Number: 2214463
Grant Information: NSF Award Search: Award # 2214463 – Fostering AI Literacy through Embodiment and Creativity across Informal Learning Spaces
Exhibits
Knowledge Net is an exhibit in which learners construct semantic networks (a type of knowledge representation) to create virtual characters on a tangible touch table. Up to four users can collaborate at stations to create characters that live in a virtual “world”. Users can control characters’ appearance, abilities, likes, and dislikes to view their resulting behaviors and interactions.
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DataBites is a museum exhibit aimed at fostering middle-school-age children’s understanding of supervised machine learning. Supervised machine learning is a type of AI that involves constructing algorithms that use provided instances to predict future outcomes. It is used in technologies like image and speech recognition and recommendation systems.
Our design allows learners to use tangible pieces to collaboratively create their own labeled examples of pizzas and sandwiches to include in a training dataset for an image-based machine-learning pizza/sandwich classification algorithm. The algorithm can classify sandwiches and pizzas by learning patterns from learners’ examples. Learners can view the results and self-evaluate how well their dataset did at enabling the algorithm to distinguish between the two items.
The LuminAI exhibit builds on an existing AI installation in which participants can improvise movement together with an AI dance partner that is projected onto a screen. In the expanded version of LuminAI, learners can engage with an interactive visual interface to explore different aspects of the dancer’s decision-making processes and memory, such as manipulating the dancer’s response modes (mimicry, transforming a gesture, performing a gesture from memory that is similar or contrasting to the observed gesture), switching between different databases of dance gestures (e.g. ballet, popular dance), and exploring a 3D visual representation of the way the dancer uses unsupervised learning to cluster (i.e. group) gestures in memory.
Our collaborators at Georgia Tech are taking the lead on the continued development of LuminAI into an exhibit that can foster AI literacy.
Publications
Belghith, Y., Mahdavi Goloujeh, A., Magerko, B., Long, D., Mcklin, T., & Roberts, J. (2024, May). Testing, Socializing, Exploring: Characterizing Middle Schoolers’ Approaches to and Conceptions of ChatGPT. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pp. 1–17).
Darabipourshiraz, H., Ambani, D., & Long, D. (2024, June). DataBites: An embodied and co-creative museum exhibit to foster children’s understanding of supervised machine learning. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 550-555).
Rollins, S., Hancock, K., Ali-Diaz, J., Shahdadpuri, N., & Long, D. (2024, June). Knowledge Net: Fostering Children’s Understanding of Knowledge Representations Through Creative Making and Embodied Interaction in a Museum Exhibit. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 470-475).
Kafai, Y. B., Proctor, C., Cai, S., Castro, F., Delaney, V., DesPortes, K., Hoadley, C., Lee, V. R., Long, D., Magerko, B., Roberts, J., Shapiro, B. R., Tseng, T., Zhong, V., & Rosé, C. P. (2024). What Does it Mean to be Literate in the Time of AI? Different Perspectives on Learning and Teaching AI Literacies in K-12 Education. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 1856-1862).
Trajkova, M., Deshpande, M., Knowlton, A., Monden, C., Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2023, July). AI Meets Holographic Pepper’s Ghost: A Co-Creative Public Dance Experience. In Companion Publication of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. (pp. 274–278).
Long, D., Rollins, S., Ali-Diaz, J., Hancock, K., Nuonsinoeun, S., Roberts, J., & Magerko, B. (2023, June). Fostering AI Literacy with Embodiment & Creativity: From Activity Boxes to Museum Exhibits. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 727-731).
Long, D., Rollins, S., Ali-Diaz, J., Hancock, K., Nuonsinoeun, S., Roberts, J., & Magerko, B. (2023, June). Fostering AI Literacy with Embodiment & Creativity: From Activity Boxes to Museum Exhibits. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 727-731).
Long, D., Roberts, J., Magerko, B., Holstein, K., DiPaola, D., & Martin, F. (2023, April). AI Literacy: Finding Common Threads between Education, Design, Policy, and Explainability. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6).