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Children's early development of creativity contributes to their learning outcomes and personal growth. However, as children enter formal schooling systems, their creativity declines. While Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools for K-12 learning usher immense potential for reducing barriers for creative expression, access to these AI tools and AI knowledge among K-12 students and educators remain inequitable. In my research, I aim to make AI, an emerging creative medium, more accessible for young creators. This work focuses on three research questions: (1) How can we promote Creative AI literacy for all K-12 students, with the goal of empowering them with powerful modes of creation, while helping them be responsible creators, thinkers and citizens in an AI-driven future?, (2) How can we design AI agents to foster creative learning in children, and (3) How can we make AI-supported creativity tools more equitable? In this talk, I will discuss various Creative AI and Data Science curricula that I have developed for K-12 students and teachers. I will reflect on the process of designing learning materials for diverse student groups and research findings about shifts in children’s AI learning from long-term deployment of these curricula. I will discuss the design of playful AI tools and social-interactive agents that foster creative expression in children. I will outline future directions in leveraging personalized ML to develop creativity-support tools. I will end by reflecting on the broader implications of this work on K-12 education, and how we can design pedagogy suitable for diverse learning contexts and low-resource classrooms.
Speaker: Safinah Arshad Ali (graduate student at the Personal Robots Group at MIT Media Lab)
Sponsor: RCCHU; Harvard University; MIT