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Project

Interactive Storybooks for Early AI Literacy

Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Stefon Benson

Groups

Children today are more digitally connected than ever before, with increasing exposure to tablets, social media, and smartphones. As technology continues to influence their lives at younger ages and given their impressionability and vulnerability to misinformation, it is becoming crucial to teach children about the true uses and capabilities of AI. Better understanding of AI will help children develop informed opinions about how they wish to use AI, recognize how AI is used by others in their daily lives, and navigate its growing presence in areas like schools, homes, and public spaces.

While AI Education has grown immensely over the past several years, this growth has mostly been seen in colleges and high schools, leaving elementary schools limited. This is especially true of the primary grades (K-3) despite the fact that they see AI-generated content in their everyday lives.

To this end, we are developing the Interactive Storybooks for Early AI Literacy, which will include a series of ten online interactive storybooks, complementary educator guides, and corresponding robot interactions that reinforce learning.

Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

The interactive storybooks follow a robot named Doodlebot who wishes to become an artist, despite the misgivings of Dr. No, who runs a camp called Camp Creative. In the first three books, students are introduced to core concepts like robotics, AI, engineering, and coding. In the rest of the books, students learn more advanced concepts like machine learning, affective computing, and AI ethics.

All books contain minigames inside them to engage students through creative play. Additionally, the books utilize LLMs to create pages where students can have dialogue with the book characters regarding important questions like "Can robots be creative?"

The educator guides will help teachers implement these books and curricula in their classrooms without outside guidance, enabling this tool and curriculum to be used at scale.

Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Robot interactions to reinforce learning are also in development. These robot interactions will follow student usage of the interactive storybooks and will also have a creative theme. By conversing with and collaborating with a social robot, students will create art using AI through these robot interactions. The social robot partner will be able to proactively ask students questions, helping them stay focused on the activity, and will also be available to answer any related questions to the activity or the subjects.

Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

We have run pilot studies with nearly 50 students and collected data indicating that the storybooks are effectively engaging and educating students in grades 1-3. We will continue piloting our tools through development and will run a full-scale study with all the books and robot interactions in early 2025. To do so, we will collaborate with local and global educational organizations to test our work with, ensuring that this tool successfully engages the target demographic and can make a true impact on early childhood AI and robotics education.

The team is excited to continue working on this tool and running user studies through the 2024-2025 academic year. We will share more updates as the project progresses and look forward to engaging students, teachers, and parents in our efforts.

Project Research

Theme | AI Literacy

We seek to empower everyone to become conscientious consumers, ethical engineers, creative problem solvers, and informed advocates for resp…