The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has come to the rescue to the millions of students and parents stranded at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic to learn relevant technology of the future. The MIT Media Lab, part of MIT, has launched aieducation.mit.edu to share a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) centric online activities for K-12 students to learn about AI, with a focus on how to design and use it responsibly. The website features free educational activities that support project-based STEM learning in an exciting and innovative area. 

The website features project-based activities, child-friendly software tools, digital interactive, learning units and various other material, prepared for learners with varying levels of comfort with technology, for a range of AI topics. The activities highlighted on the website are designed in the tradition of constructionism: learning through project-based experiences in which learners build and share their work. The approach is also inspired by the idea of computational action, where children can design AI-enabled technologies to help others in their community.

“MIT is the birthplace of Constructionism under Seymour Papert. MIT has revolutionised how children learn computational thinking with hugely successful platforms such as Scratch and App Inventor. Now, we are bringing this rich tradition and deep expertise to how children learn about AI through project-based learning that dovetails technical concepts with ethical design and responsible use,” says Cynthia Breazeal, Media Lab Associate Professor, who led the team that curated and created aieducation.mit.edu. Other collaborators include faculty, staff and students from MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, and MIT Open Learning.

The activities on the site include hands-on programming to paper prototyping, to Socratic seminars, and even creative writing about speculative fiction. The learning units and project-based activities are designed to be accessible to a wide audience with different backgrounds and comfort levels with technology. A number of these activities leverage learning about AI as a way to connect to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, too, offering a holistic view of how AI intersects with different interests and endeavours. 

The website also hosts external resources to aid learning - it features Google’s Teachable Machines, a browser-based platform that lets users train classifiers for their own image-recognition algorithms in a user-friendly way.