The Center for Learning With Nature and collaborators including faculty from the University of Louisiana (Lafayette) were recently awarded funding for a K-12/AI-related project. AI is already being used by K-12 teachers and students. Our hope is to try and create an AI tool that improves on what is already happening in K-12.
Our concept is to create an AI tool that
1) Uses the Socratic method — i.e., produces relevant, guiding questions to help students think critically rather than spits out answers. This addresses the cognitive offloading problem of AI, where students just ask AI questions and use the answers uncritically, short-circuiting their own cognitive development.
2) Is explicit with students about how the AI works, its assumptions, etc. We call this “glass box” instead of black box.
3) Provides students with a background understanding and appreciation of the many fascinating, bioinspired building blocks that resulted in today’s various AI approaches and tools.
We’ve selected a challenge-to-biology activity for middle schoolers as our test case. This will provide a specific context for the AI tool development. Bioinspiration is a fitting context in part because of our emphasis on cognitive development when teaching C2B and because modern AI is so based on bioinspired innovation.
The current grant is to do conceptualization and planning for developing a prototype AI tool (the actual development of which would happen if we receive next phase funding). In this phase, we are gathering the thoughts, ideas, concerns, and feedback from a team of K-12 teachers, parents, and computer scientists. This information will help inform our tool concept and prototype.
More to come…
