In today’s tech-savvy and digital world, artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology that has made a significant impact in various areas of daily life. The ecommerce portals that provide product recommendations, the music player that plays your favorite songs, and the autocorrect feature when you are typing on your smartphone, AI is everywhere. From manufacturing to medicine, and shopping to banking, artificial intelligence has become an indispensable part of our lives. The real challenge is to teach AI to children. Teaching AI to students is not easy since the concept of artificial intelligence is quite technical and complex, especially for school students.
Teaching AI in schools is essential
- Teaching AI to school students is essential as AI is a technology that they come across and use in day-to-day life.
- Schools need to focus on teaching AI in a way that will help students understand the concept of artificial intelligence and how it actually functions.
- Teaching AI in school will allow children to develop critical and analytical learning skills and understand the various applications of AI.
- Various AI activities can be used to teach AI to students. These will help students reflect on the dangers of artificial intelligence as a technology.
Here are some AI activities that can help teachers teach AI to students in school.
The intelligent piece of paper activity to teach AI
- In the real sense, artificial intelligence refers to the use of machines to replicate human intelligence.
- AI-powered machines are capable of doing what humans can. Instead of preprogramming a computer, it is now possible to train it using various data patterns so that it can learn and make decisions on its own.
- With training data, machines are getting better at making predictions just like human beings can.
- The intelligent piece of paper activity requires some knowledge of the game tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses.
- The purpose of this game is to introduce the concept of artificial intelligence and computer programs to the participants. Students learn that the working of computers involves following a certain set of instructions set by the programmers.
- The game involves two players competing against each other—one is a human player, and the second is an intelligent piece of paper.
- The game of tic-tac-toe involves one player following the instructions (commands) written on the piece of paper, while the other human player is free to make any response he/she likes.
- This intelligent piece of paper will win the game every time, or the game will be a tie every time.
- As the students in the classroom watch the piece of ‘pre-programmed’ paper respond to each move, they understand how a computer can adapt to human responses and may even beat him/her in a game to become better at playing than a human being.
Teaching AI with facial recognition
- Facial recognition involves computers identifying the right images from a pool of images based on facial data patterns. This activity can help teach students how machine learning works.
- A computer cannot see an “image” like humans can. So, how does it extract meaningful data from one image and compare it with another image?
- This activity teaches students the workings of facial recognition and also how face detection from an image is possible.
- This activity involves a mystery character. Students break down the images of the unnamed Disney character into a series of physical features. For example, eye color, hair color, dress color, skin color, etc.
- This set of features is then compared with the features of known Disney characters to reveal the name of the unnamed character.
- A similarity score is assigned to each character based on the number of features matched.
The Turing Test in the AI Classroom
- The Turing Test was designed by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptanalyst.
- This test assesses the power of a machine to mimic human behavior.
- In order to pass the Turing Test, a machine must be able to falsely prove to a human that it is also a human being.
- When played in the classroom to learn AI, this test involves three players. Player A will play the role of a human. Player B will be the computer, and Player C will be a student volunteer who communicates the answers of Player A and Player B to the students in the classroom.
- Player A and B will stand outside the classroom such that none of the students can see them. Player B, who is the computer, will only respond to questions with the answers provided.
- Player A who is a human being will respond to questions as he or she sees fit.
- The students need to identify which player is human and which one is a computer based on the nature of the responses (answers) provided for the questions.
Teaching AI in an already overcrowded classroom can be difficult and challenging, especially if there are no tech tools in the classroom. However, in order to teach AI and demonstrate the concept of artificial intelligence, there is no need for sophisticated tech devices or gadgets. Using the three AI activities, it is possible to demonstrate the concept of artificial intelligence in the classroom easily and effectively.