Collaboration with AI: AI as a coding partner with third graders!

 About 12 years ago I attended a presentation at SXSW EDU conference by an early childhood professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She talked about how important it was to start to talk to our youngest students about robots and robotics even if they could not developmentally understand the complexity of robotics. The presenter talked about the need for preschoolers to start to think about how robots could be used to help people and the world at a young age so as they got older they were more prepared to understand the ethical implications of robots, that machines have the potential to help society but also have the potential to have negative impacts. When we start to introduce complex topics with young students in developmentally appropriate ways we are building a foundation for them to have more complex conversations and think about how to use technology in ethical ways. This is true for robots and robotics and for artificial intelligence.

I am always trying to find new ways to have conversations with my younger students about artificial intelligence. I think this is important because AI has the potential to have an impact on all of our lives, the potential for positive and negative impacts. I think it is important to start to have conversations with students when they are younger to not only have the conversations about the ethical implications of AI, the negatives, and when it should and should not be used. I want to model some ways that AI could be a helpful tool. That idea sparked this idea to introduce AI as a tool to help third graders code in HTML.

Third graders do a study of the city of Chicago. This year, they focused on the history of the elevated train system. They did research on the history of the Chicago "L." Learning about when and why it started, what came before, how the train evolved from steam engines to an electric rail system. They learned how the train lines expanded from elevated tracks, to a subway and to street level in some areas. The research involved reading about the history, looking at and collecting data from historic pictures and even watching videos about what it is like to live right next to the elevated train tracks and the famous CTA Holiday train.

Next, students made connections with what they learned in their classrooms about different neighborhoods in Chicago. We talked about how Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, each with distinct histories and unique features and identities. The "L" train connects them all together. I introduced the idea of maps as storytelling. They examined all kinds of Chicago maps—maps of parks, murals throughout the city, and even every Chicago hot dog restaurant. Each map revealed something special and told its own story about our city.

For the project, students were tasked with creating a 3D map of the CTA that tells the story of the diverse and amazing neighborhoods of Chicago. They researched different neighborhoods and the train line that you can take to the neighborhood. Students created websites with facts and pictures from their research. Then they designed 3D prints using the website Tinkercad.com for 3D design and printed out symbols from their neighborhoods or train systems. The designs were connected to the websites using NFC tags. When someone taps the design to a smartphone the student website pops up on their phone.

The AI add-on

In past years the project would have stopped at the last step. This year, I decided to think of a way to engage students on AI and model how it might be used as a tool to help. I thought it would be interesting to present the idea of adding a quiz to the end of their website using the research they did on the history of the "L" train. Students loved the idea! We talked about how the code for a website is HTML and that is a way more advanced coding language **than** they are ready to do. Students have only used Scratch block based coding. We talked about and looked at the HTML code that makes up websites. I showed them the thousands of lines of codes that go into the functions of websites. Next I introduced the idea of using AI as a coding collaborator. What if we collaborated with our school's AI program Flint to write the code with the research the third graders did adding the features to the quiz they wanted. Third graders were up for the idea!

I started by introducing the Flint AI program. This program is new to my school this year and right now only sixth through twelfth graders have logins. Teachers in those grades have access to the students' accounts and are able to share assignments that AI might be a helpful tool. Teachers can see all communications and information shared by the students. Flint is also a closed model, none of the information or prompts that students or educators share in the program is used to train the model or collected. I explained to the third graders how Flint works and we talked about how AI works, how it can be a helpful tool and also some of the negatives about AI. We talked about the limitations of AI.

Then we looked at the Flint AI site and introduced our first prompt, asking the machine to generate a HTML webpage quiz and shared all the research that students did to generate the questions. Students tested the first iteration of the game and gave the machine feedback, asking for a timer, sounds, changing up the questions, giving points and a hint button. Third graders kept giving feedback and asking for different features and iterations of the quiz. Some of the feedback the machine correctly fixed some it did not. This led to another discussion about the limitations of AI and how it is not a perfect machine or replacement for human creativity. Even if you use AI, you need to edit and check everything and go in and fix aspects of what it produced. Third graders talked about how they knew if the quiz answers were correct because they did the research and used reliable sources and would know if the AI quiz was wrong. This helped them to understand that AI can be a tool but should not be their only resource, they needed a strong understanding of the subject matter.

When it came to the HTML code, third graders expressed frustration that the AI did not generate the code correctly and we talked about how it was still an important skill for them to learn how to code independently. If they had the HTML coding experience and skills they could have fixed the code to make the quiz work the way they wanted it to. This was another way of highlighting that AI is not a replacement for human knowledge and creativity.

The AI add-on for this project was a great way to continue to have discussions with younger students about artificial intelligence, the positives and negatives. The hope is as students have these experiences and discussions at a younger age they will be thoughtful, ethical users of AI as they get older as learners and adults.