Cultivating Awareness about A.I. with our Children

Yesterday, my colleague Steve Lescault and I along with Lisa Jacobsen, Pedagogy and Technology Integration Specialist & Technology Teacher at The Study school for girls taught our first class to 6th graders about artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The goal of the class is to introduce the students to artificial intelligence with a specific emphasis on understanding the role that bias plays in the field. We discuss what A.I. is and isn’t; talk about how A.I. is in many parts of our lives; watch a video which demonstrates how unintentional bias finds its way into A.I. and then do some Google searches to show how bias affects auto-complete on your search queries.

We end the class with hands on experimentation using the Intellogo cognitive platform. The students are taught how to train the system to recognize concepts (for our class the student groups trained the system to understand carrots, pineapples, the Hunger Games and emojis). The students review the results paying particular attention to bias (why is the system not recognizing carrot cake? Why are the districts of Syria showing up for Hunger Games?) The students then iteratively improve their concepts by becoming aware of their own biases in their initial set of training samples.

At the end of the class we invite the students to think of A.I. as a child that needs good teachers in order to learn well and to appreciate that A.I. needs them just as much as they need A.I.