Throughout the journey from the suburbs to the town, the tree cover often dwindles down as skyscrapers stand up. A bunch of Recent England Innovation Academy students wondered why that’s.
“Our friend Victoria noticed that where we live in Marlborough there are a number of trees in our own backyards. But should you drive just half-hour to Boston, there are almost no trees,” said highschool junior Ileana Fournier. “We were struck by that duality.”
This inspired Fournier and her classmates Victoria Leeth and Jessie Magenyi to prototype a mobile app that illustrates Massachusetts deforestation trends for Day of AI, a free, hands-on curriculum developed by the MIT Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative, headquartered within the MIT Media Lab and in collaboration with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Open Learning. They were amongst a gaggle of 20 students from Recent England Innovation Academy who shared their projects through the 2024 Day of AI global celebration hosted with the Museum of Science.
The Day of AI curriculum introduces K-12 students to artificial intelligence. Now in its third 12 months, Day of AI enables students to enhance their communities and collaborate on larger global challenges using AI. Fournier, Leeth, and Magenyi’s TreeSavers app falls under the Telling Climate Stories with Data module, certainly one of 4 latest climate-change-focused lessons.
“We would like you to have the option to specific yourselves creatively to make use of AI to unravel problems with critical-thinking skills,” Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE, dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, and professor of media arts and sciences, said during this 12 months’s Day of AI global celebration on the Museum of Science. “We would like you to have an ethical and responsible method to take into consideration this really powerful, cool, and exciting technology.”
Moving from understanding to motion
Day of AI invites students to look at the intersection of AI and various disciplines, comparable to history, civics, computer science, math, and climate change. With the curriculum available year-round, greater than 10,000 educators across 114 countries have brought Day of AI activities to their classrooms and houses.
The curriculum gives students the agency to guage local issues and invent meaningful solutions. “We’re serious about easy methods to create tools that can allow kids to have direct access to data and have a private connection that intersects with their lived experiences,” Robert Parks, curriculum developer at MIT RAISE, said on the Day of AI global celebration.
Before this 12 months, first-year Jeremie Kwapong said he knew little or no about AI. “I used to be very intrigued,” he said. “I began to experiment with ChatGPT to see the way it reacts. How close can I get this to human emotion? What’s AI’s knowledge in comparison with a human’s knowledge?”
Along with helping students spark an interest in AI literacy, teachers world wide have told MIT RAISE that they wish to use data science lessons to interact students in conversations about climate change. Due to this fact, Day of AI’s latest hands-on projects use weather and climate change to indicate students why it’s vital to develop a critical understanding of dataset design and collection when observing the world around them.
“There’s a lag between cause and effect in on a regular basis lives,” said Parks. “Our goal is to demystify that, and permit kids to access data so that they can see an extended view of things.”
Tools like MIT App Inventor — which allows anyone to create a mobile application — help students make sense of what they will learn from data. Fournier, Leeth, and Magenyi programmed TreeSavers in App Inventor to chart regional deforestation rates across Massachusetts, discover ongoing trends through statistical models, and predict environmental impact. The scholars put that “long view” of climate change into practice when developing TreeSavers’ interactive maps. Users can toggle between Massachusetts’s current tree cover, historical data, and future high-risk areas.
Although AI provides fast answers, it doesn’t necessarily offer equitable solutions, said David Sittenfeld, director of the Center for the Environment on the Museum of Science. The Day of AI curriculum asks students to make decisions on sourcing data, ensuring unbiased data, and pondering responsibly about how findings may very well be used.
“There’s an ethical concern about tracking people’s data,” said Ethan Jorda, a Recent England Innovation Academy student. His group used open-source data to program an app that helps users track and reduce their carbon footprint.
Christine Cunningham, senior vice chairman of STEM Learning on the Museum of Science, believes students are prepared to make use of AI responsibly to make the world a greater place. “They’ll see themselves shaping the world they live in,” said Cunningham. “Moving through from understanding to motion, kids won’t ever have a look at a bridge or a chunk of plastic lying on the bottom in the identical way again.”
Deepening collaboration on earth and beyond
The 2024 Day of AI speakers emphasized collaborative problem solving on the local, national, and global levels.
“Through different ideas and different perspectives, we’re going to improve solutions,” said Cunningham. “How can we start young enough that each child has a probability to each understand the world around them but additionally to maneuver toward shaping the longer term?”
Presenters from MIT, the Museum of Science, and NASA approached this query with a standard goal — expanding STEM education to learners of all ages and backgrounds.
“We’ve got been delighted to collaborate with the MIT RAISE team to bring this 12 months’s Day of AI celebration to the Museum of Science,” says Meg Rosenburg, manager of operations on the Museum of Science Centers for Public Science Learning. “This chance to focus on the brand new climate modules for the curriculum not only perfectly aligns with the museum’s goals to concentrate on climate and energetic hope throughout our 12 months of the Earthshot initiative, however it has also allowed us to bring our teams together and grow a relationship that we’re very excited to construct upon in the longer term.”
Rachel Connolly, systems integration and evaluation lead for NASA’s Science Activation Program, showed the facility of collaboration with the instance of how human comprehension of Saturn’s appearance has evolved. From Galileo’s early telescope to the Cassini space probe, modern imaging of Saturn represents 400 years of science, technology, and math working together to further knowledge.
“Technologies, and the engineers who built them, advance the questions we’re in a position to ask and due to this fact what we’re in a position to understand,” said Connolly, research scientist at MIT Media Lab.
Recent England Innovation Academy students saw a possibility for collaboration somewhat closer to home. Emmett Buck-Thompson, Jeff Cheng, and Max Hunt envisioned a social media app to attach volunteers with local charities. Their project was inspired by Buck-Thompson’s father’s difficulties finding volunteering opportunities, Hunt’s role because the president of the college’s Community Impact Club, and Cheng’s aspiration to scale back screen time for social media users. Using MIT App Inventor, their combined ideas led to a prototype with the potential to make a real-world impact of their community.
The Day of AI curriculum teaches the mechanics of AI, ethical considerations and responsible uses, and interdisciplinary applications for various fields. It also empowers students to grow to be creative problem solvers and engaged residents of their communities and online. From supporting volunteer efforts to encouraging motion for the state’s forests to tackling the worldwide challenge of climate change, today’s students have gotten tomorrow’s leaders with Day of AI.
“We would like to empower you to know that it is a tool you should use to make your community higher, to assist people around you with this technology,” said Breazeal.
Other Day of AI speakers included Tim Ritchie, president of the Museum of Science; Michael Lawrence Evans, program director of the Boston Mayor’s Office of Recent Urban Mechanics; Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab; and Natalie Lao, executive director of the App Inventor Foundation.
