Escape or D13: Understanding Youth Perspectives of AI through Educational Game Co-design

Research Background and Issues

• Issues or Challenges: Current K-12 AI education programs are often simplified versions of university-level content, neglecting students' unique perspectives and cultural backgrounds. Additionally, existing AI educational game designs primarily target tech-savvy college students, with limited attention to the needs of K-12 students, especially those from minority groups and gender minorities. Another major observation is that much of AI education focuses on programming, overlooking topics such as AI ethics and societal impacts.
• Significance: As AI technologies become widespread and integrated into daily life (e.g., ChatGPT and Alexa), it is crucial to cultivate the next generation's basic understanding of AI and critical thinking skills. Enhancing AI literacy and interest among minority groups and women can help increase diversity and reduce inequalities in technological education.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Research from the United States based on five core AI educational principles (perception, representation and reasoning, learning, natural interaction, and societal impact) provides direction for K-12 AI education. However, most of these studies are led by educators or developers without extensively considering students' voices. The authors employed a co-design approach, collaborating with minority girls and non-binary youth to design educational games, aiming to uncover their understanding and expectations of AI.

Solution

• Proposed Solution: The authors conducted a co-design research activity, inviting 39 high school girls and non-binary youth to collaboratively design educational AI games. These games served as a medium to reveal students' understanding and application of AI concepts. The study focused on three key aspects:
  1. How do the games designed by students reflect their understanding and application of basic AI concepts?
  2. What perspectives on AI's role in educational games are revealed during the co-design process?
  3. What prior knowledge do students utilize when designing AI-related educational games?
• Innovation: This study introduces co-design into the development of AI educational games, emphasizing students' cultural backgrounds and unique perspectives while enhancing their AI literacy. It challenges the traditional developer-led content design model and fosters students' critical thinking about AI ethics and societal impacts.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Use AI4GA teaching materials to introduce students to the "five core AI principles" through classroom instruction.
  2. Conduct group-based co-design activities, where students design educational games using low-tech paper and physical tools.
  3. Students present and discuss their game designs, allowing the research team to extract potential misconceptions and cultural expressions related to AI knowledge from these creative works.
  4. Perform qualitative analysis and thematic coding on students' games, discussion records, and teacher feedback.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:
  1. Students integrated AI concepts into diverse game designs using narratives and role-playing, applying algorithms like classification and graph search to game scenarios (e.g., flower classification, robot decision-making).
  2. The games demonstrated partial understanding of AI concepts but also revealed common misconceptions. For instance, students applied LIDAR and GPS technologies to underwater scenarios, overlooking the limitations of these technologies in aquatic environments.
  3. Most games reflected three views of AI: AI as a tool, AI as a playable character, and AI as a moral agent for reflecting on ethical values.
  4. Students' creativity was influenced by their cultural backgrounds, linguistic habits, and personal entertainment experiences, such as referencing popular games like Pokemon Go or using internet slang (e.g., "slay") to enhance the games' appeal and educational value.
• Advantages:
  1. This study addresses the cultural isolation issues of traditional teaching programs by directly listening to the voices of minority youth.
  2. Unlike programming-centered AI courses, the research highlights non-technical pathways (e.g., game narratives) to demonstrate students' understanding of AI concepts.
  3. Low-tech activities address the challenges of AI education in low-resource settings.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  1. Most student-designed games demonstrated initial mastery of basic AI concepts such as "supervised learning" and "perception and reasoning."
  2. Misapplications during the game design process helped researchers identify areas for improvement in teaching modules (e.g., technical limitations of perception systems).
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  1. The study participants were primarily students already involved in STEM-related projects, which may limit the generalizability to a broader youth population.
  2. Co-design may reinforce knowledge asymmetry between researchers and participating students, requiring further exploration to ensure students' design autonomy and agency.
  3. Future research could investigate how these student-designed games can be applied in real teaching environments and explore their educational effectiveness.

Conclusion

This co-design-based study not only reveals how minority students understand and engage with AI concepts but also provides valuable insights for designing diverse and culturally sensitive educational materials. Through low-tech activities, students were able to showcase their AI knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and creativity, laying a foundation for developing more effective and inclusive AI education curricula in the future.