First AI + Education Summit is a global push for “AI fluency”

This summer, 350 participants got here to MIT to dive into an issue that’s, thus far, outpacing answers: How can education still create opportunities for all when digital literacy isn’t any longer enough — a world through which students now have to have AI fluency?

The AI + Education Summit was hosted by the MIT RAISE Initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an onsite “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams of beginner and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app for fighting climate change.

In opening remarks, RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized what latest goals for AI fluency appear like. “Education will not be nearly learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is an entire developmental process. And we want to take into consideration how we support teachers in being simpler. Teachers have to be a part of the AI conversation.” Abelson highlighted the empowerment aspect of computational motion, namely its immediate impact, that “what’s different than within the a long time of individuals teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, touched upon AI-supported learning, including the imperative to make use of technology like classroom robot companions as something supplementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a substitute for each other. Or as Breazeal underlined in her talk: “We actually need people to grasp, in an appropriate way, how AI works and the best way to design it responsibly. We would like to be sure that individuals have an informed voice of how AI needs to be integrated into society. And we wish to empower all types of individuals world wide to give you the chance to make use of AI, harness AI, to unravel the vital problems of their communities.”

The summit featured the invited winners of the Global AI Hackathon. Prizes were awarded for apps in two tracks: climate and sustainability, and health and wellness. Winning projects addressed issues like sign-language-to-audio translation, moving object detection for the vision impaired, empathy practice using interactions with AI characters, and private health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demos for MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for the Personal Robots Group’s social robots, and an educator skilled development session on responsible AI.

By convening people of so many ages, skilled backgrounds, and geographies, organizers were capable of foreground a novel mixture of ideas for participants to take back home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of implementing AI in class settings, resembling extracurricular clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments within the United Arab Emirates and India. And plenary speakers tackled funding AI in education, state government’s role in supporting its adoption, and — within the summit’s keynote speech by Microsoft’s principal director of AI and machine learning engineering Francesca Lazzeri — the opportunities and challenges of the usage of generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the event of tool kits that enact safeguards around principles like fairness, security, and transparency. “I actually consider that learning generative AI will not be nearly computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s about all of us.”

Trailblazing AI education from MIT

Critical to early AI education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longtime collaborator that helped MIT deploy computational motion and project-based learning years before AI was even a widespread pedagogical challenge. A summit panel discussed the history of its CoolThink project, which brought such learning to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot after which met the ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said that the trust, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong didn’t need to add a burden to teachers and students of one other curriculum outside of college. As a substitute, they wanted “to mainstream it into our instructional system in order that every child would have equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”

MIT worked as a collaborator from CoolThink’s start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the bottom. Several summit attendees and former MIT research staff members were leaders within the project development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher skilled development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s education and business development manager, was the important curriculum developer for the initial phase of CoolThink, writing the teachings and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for the three levels within the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the event of the project’s research design and theoretical grounding. Amongst other key tasks, they ran the initial teacher training for the primary two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.

The moral demands of today’s AI “funhouse mirror”

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, delivered the closing keynote. He described the present state of AI as a “funhouse mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as yet one more technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to search out its positive, empowering uses that complement our intelligence but in addition to mitigate its risks. 

“One among the areas I’m most enthusiastic about personally,” Huttenlocher said, “is people learning from AI,” with AI discovering solutions that individuals had not yet come upon on their very own. As a lot of the summit demonstrated, AI and education is something that must occur in collaboration. “[AI] will not be human intellect. This will not be human judgment. That is something different.”