This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to delve into a question that, as yet, remains unanswered: How can education continue to create opportunities for all when digital literacy is no longer enough, in a world where students now need to be fluent in ai?
He ai-education-summit/”>ai and Education Summit It was organized by the WITH initiative LIFT (Responsible ai for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the City of Boston Mayor’s Office, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an on-site “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams of novice and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app to combat climate change.
In the opening remarksRAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized how the new goals for ai fluency are. “Education is not just about learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is a whole developmental process. And we need to think about how we support teachers to be more effective. Teachers need to be part of the conversation about ai.” Abelson highlighted the empowering aspect of computational action—that is, its immediate impact—that “what is different from the decades when people taught about computers (is) what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, referred to ai-supported learning, including the imperative to use technology like robotic companions in the classroom as complementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for each other. Or as Breazeal stressed in his talk“We want people to have a proper understanding of how ai works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice in how ai should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all kinds of people around the world to be able to use ai, to harness it, to solve important problems in their communities.”
MIT ai and Education Summit 2024: Welcome Remarks from MIT RAISE Leaders Abelson, Breazeal, and Klopfer
Video: MIT Open Learning
The summit was attended by ai-Hackathon-2024-Impact-Report-Final.pdf”>the invited winners of the ai-hackathon/”>Global artificial intelligence HackathonAwards were given to applications in two areas: climate and sustainability, and health and well-being. The winning projects addressed topics such as sign language to audio translationdetection of moving objects for the visually impaired, empathy practice through interactions with ai characters, and personal health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demonstrations of MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for visually impaired people. Group of personal robotssocial robots and a professional development session for educators on responsible ai.
By bringing together people of so many ages, career paths and geographies, the organizers were able to present a unique mix of insights for participants to take home. Conference papers included real-life case studies of ai implementation in school settings, such as after-school clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments in the UAE and India. And plenary speakers addressed Funding ai in educationthe role of state government in supporting its adoption and, in the Opening speech of the summit By Microsoft’s Principal Director of ai and Machine Learning Engineering Francesca Lazzeri on the opportunities and challenges of using generative ai in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of toolkits that implement safeguards around principles such as fairness, safety, and transparency. “I truly believe that learning generative ai is not just a matter for computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s a matter for all of us.”
MIT pioneers ai education
A key player in early ai education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a long-standing collaborator that helped MIT implement computational action and project-based learning years before ai was a widespread pedagogical challenge. A panel at the summit discussed the history of his CoolThink projectwhich brought this learning to grades 4 to 6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot and then met an ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said the foundation, MIT, the Hong Kong University of Education and City University of Hong Kong did not want to add a burden on teachers and students from another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted to “integrate it into our education system so that every child has an equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”
MIT collaborated with CoolThink from the start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the ground. Several summit attendees and former MIT research staff members were leaders in developing the project. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon led the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher professional development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s director of education and business development, was the lead curriculum developer for CoolThink’s initial phase, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for all three levels of the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led development of the project’s research design and theoretical foundation. Among other key tasks, they led the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, which consisted of sessions totalling 40 hours with approximately 40 teachers each.
The ethical demands of today's ai “laughing mirror”
Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of MIT's Schwarzman School of Computing, gave the closing speechHe described the current state of ai as a “laughing mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as another technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to find its positive and empowering uses that complement our intelligence but also mitigate its risks.
“One of the areas I’m personally most excited about,” Huttenlocher said, “is people learning from ai,” with ai discovering solutions that people hadn’t yet found on their own. As much of the summit demonstrated, ai and education is something that needs to happen collaboratively. “(ai) is not human intellect. It’s not human judgment. It’s something different.”
