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30 Minutes to Introduce AI to Kids

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 30 Minutes to Introduce AI to Kids
Heloisa Candello, Mauro Pichiliani, Claudio Pinhanez, Mairieli Wessel
IBM Research Brazil
Rua Tutóia 1157
São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Abstract
This paper addresses the challenge of designing a sci-
ence museum experience for a group of children which
should learn basic concepts about AI in a 30-minute en-
gaging, hands-on, playful session coordinated by a mu-
seum guide. The experience is designed to make them
comprehend that AI systems are built from and by peo-
ple, and materialized in a series of activities where the
children improve the abilities of three AI-powered talk-
ing heads which compete in a science trivia game.
Introduction and Context
In the first months of 2018 one of the biggest science muse-
ums in Latin America started planning a new exhibit which
could introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) to children. A
partnership was established with the IBM Research labora-
tory in Brazil which had not only the expertise in AI but also
previous experience with interactive art work using modern
AI techniques (Candello et al. 2019b). This paper presents
and discusses key design decisions made during the partner-
ship regarding what would be explored with the kids and
how that it would be best done.
The science museum has hundreds of exhibit covering sci-
ence and technology topics, with content and language fo-
cused on K-12 children. It receives more than half million
visitors each year, including about 40 schools groups every
day. Each of these school groups explores the museum in a
set of 45-minute sessions where a museum guide performs
deep-dive activities around a particular exhibit.
The fundamental challenges posed to the team were:
(1) to choose the subset of key ideas and concepts to explore
with the children; and (2) to create an engaging, playful ex-
perience which would construct those fundamental concepts
with the kids. A large space of about 50 m2 was made avail-
able and an initial determination was made to focus on kids
who could already read and write.
Recent work in K-12 AI education has explored how
children learn AI concepts based on the exposure to so-
cial AI companions (Williams et al. 2019; Sakulkueakul-
suk et al. 2018), and the perception of machine intelli-
gence (Williams, Park, and Breazeal 2019). Furthermore,
Copyright c 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
there are significant efforts to address the development of
guidelines and resources to provide further directions for
formal learning (Touretzky et al. 2019; Burgsteiner, Kandl-
hofer, and Steinbauer 2016). Examples of previous work in
the intersection of informal learning places and technologies
are (Ciolfi 2018; Cafaro, Vilhjálmsson, and Bickmore 2016;
Burgard et al. 1998; Bickmore, Pfeifer, and Schulman 2011),
and museum AI exhibitions that are hands-on although do
not focus on teaching AI concepts in action (Shiomi et
al. 2006; Laumond, Vidal, and Boutin 2018; Dittmann and
Lange 2018). In this work we focus on an AI exhibition for
informal learning in a museum space.
Which AI Concepts are Essential to Kids?
The initial work of the design team was to decide which
subset of AI concepts would be the focus the physical ex-
hibit and the guided visit. For most of the children visit-
ing the museum, the experience would be their first contact
with basic concepts of AI, and for many, the only moment in
the next years where such ideas would be actually explored.
The majority of the schools who visit the museum are from
poor neighborhoods with no computer science, fab-maker or
robotics laboratory.
The team explored different ideas for the key thematic
axes of the exhibit, including a history of AI, how neural
networks work, how AI may transform human life and so-
ciety, and issues of bias and privacy. This work eventually
converged to a key question: what people should know about
AI to inform their decisions about its use in society? In other
words, the exhibit was to be centered around the minimum
understanding of AI technology which could enable citizens
to make better decisions about how AI should affect the soci-
ety they live, and specially, to question the black-box nature
of many AI system.
Based on this guidance, some key themes surfaced:
(1) AI systems are based on knowledge acquired from hu-
man beings through examples; (2) AI systems do not know
everything and make mistakes; and (3) AI systems are cor-
rected and improved by human beings. In summary, children
shall leave the exhibit having a sense that an AI system is
not a perfect, magic black box which solves problems bet-
ter than people, but in fact that AI mimics the imperfection
of human beings and of our society, and therefore should be
questioned and controlled by its citizens.
 Creating an AI Exhibit for a Science Museum
The actual design task was to cover those key themes in
only 30 minutes since in practice 15 minutes of the 45-
minute session is used for moving and organizing the chil-
dren. Moreover, the experience should be playful, engaging,
and hands-on, following an active learning approach.
From this perspective, several field studies were per-
formed with visitors, museum guides, managers, technical
staff, and educational curators. First, observational studies
in the wild aimed to capture the everyday dynamic of visi-
tors’ actions, and how they made accountable their interac-
tions with museum technology to others (friends and fami-
lies). In these studies, visitors answered semi-structured in-
terviews unpacking and explaining their impressions and ac-
tions which were observed by researchers during the day.
We also conducted focus group sessions with managers,
curators, technical staff, and educational curators to capture
which science topics would be relevant to explore in the ex-
hibition, insights about the everyday challenges of children
interaction with the museum technologies available in the
museum, its purpose, and maintenance issues.
Additionally, we carry out a number of activities with
the museum guides, since they are the subject matter ex-
perts (SME) of the science museum topics. The activities
include: (1) Observational studies to capture the way vis-
itors rely on them to deliver information; (2) Collaborative
sessions (Candello et al. 2019c); (3) Participatory design fic-
tions (Candello et al. 2019a) to unveil their expectations on
how to teaching science topics to AI systems; (4) Learning
sessions on how to create conversational AI systems with
IBM Watson Assistant technology; and (5) Workshops for
creating and tailoring the expected questions from visitors.
The design concept was generated based on those activi-
ties and on brainstorm sessions with museum curators, and
technical and educational staff from the museum. Planned
participatory design activities with children will also shape
the tone and result before opening the exhibition in 2020.
An AI Learning Experience for Citizens
The result of the design process was an experience which,
although focused on the citizen themes discussed before,
also contemplated some historical aspects. The exhibit space
resembles, in many aspects, the famous AI event of 2011
where a computer defeated two world champions in the TV
trivia game Jeopardy. In the space (see Figure 1), three talk-
ing heads compete in a trivia game about science topics the
children have just learned about in their visit to the museum.
During the game, the children see some of the talking heads
being unable to answer some questions. Then the children
are invited to improve the AI system of the talking heads by
working on 3 touch displays, each connected to one of the
talking heads. Here is a basic description of the experience:
1. Introduction: Children are assembled in groups around
the touch displays and the museum guide introduces the
term Artificial Intelligence, connecting to devices and
apps commonly used by children.
2. First trivia game: The guide engages the 3 talking heads
in a science trivia game by asking questions and observ-
Figure 1: Design sketch of the exhibit space.
ing the heads take turns answering. In each question one
of the talking heads acknowledges not being good at the
question topic.
3. Quick tutorial: The museum guide explains how the
talking heads work, which is by matching the question
asked to previously stored examples, following the intent-
action model often used in commercial dialogue systems
such as IBM Watson Assistant. The guide then tells the
children that they can improve the talking heads perfor-
mance by providing more examples and shows them how
do that using the interface on the touch displays.
4. Children improve the talking heads: Each of the 3
groups of children works on one of the touch displays
to provide more examples and improve the performance
of a particular head. They insert a new example and test
whether the talking head can then utter the right answer.
The talking head give feedback to the kids when they
manage to improve its performance with the new infor-
mation provided by them.
5. Trivia game with the improved talking heads: The
guide engages the 3 talking heads again in the trivia game,
asking the questions the kids worked on. The performance
of talking heads improves noticeably.
6. Final discussion: The guide congratulates all teams about
the great work they did teaching the talking heads and dis-
cusses with the children some of the ideas learned. Then
the children are dismissed from the exhibit and taken to
the next session.
As we see, the children’s experience is geared towards
making them understand, by doing, that the knowledge ex-
hibited by the talking heads comes in fact from people like
them, that the heads make mistakes, and that human beings
are required to improve the head’s behavior.
Final Words
We are currently in the process of developing and deploying
the exhibit, working with software developers, scenic and
visual design artists, and museum personnel. Some prelimi-
nary tests with children are being conducted to validate some
of the key assumptions of the experience and of the interface.
We expect to have the exhibit up and running in early 2020.
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