Tag Archives: Birdbrain Technologies

Artificial Intelligence in K-12

Why is it important for all learners (students, parents, teachers, community members) to become more aware of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? To answer this question I reached out to a series of educators in the Pittsburgh region who are working with K-12 students and educators. I’ll take a look at the work being done at the Readiness Institute (RI) of Penn State, resources and insights from the Birdbrain Technologies company, a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, and teachers at the Winchester Thurston (WT) School who have developed a course in Machine Learning for High School.

Why is AI important for K-12 students to learn?

According to Bambi Brewer who worked on curricular materials for Birdbrain Technologies:

I think it is important for everyone to learn something about AI because AI systems are making decisions in our world right now, and I think everyone should have the information they need to help us as a society make responsible decisions about what kinds of systems we use and what decisions we do or don’t want them to make.

In my conversation with Lance Lindauer, the Executive Director for PART (Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology), we discussed the importance of AI as a part of digital technology education. Lance believes it’s important for learners to understand how to exert control over their personal agency when using various forms of technology. Also, as technology today is infused into all fields – health, education, manufacturing, transportation – and it’s vital for people to see that technology as something that is not scary, rather it has tremendous benefits when developed and deployed responsibly and ethically.  Lance stressed the importance for each person to become an “ambassador” for themselves in a technology economy, and to interact with technology in positive ways to also help benefit one’s community. 

Moreover, it’s critical that people understand how to responsibly use that technology. Bambi Brewer extended that idea to algorithms, the mathematical approach to finding patterns that underlies AI:

My goal is to get people talking in an informed way about how we deal with things like the bias that can occur with AI algorithms. Sometimes people see that just because it is technology, it is inherently unbiased, and that just isn’t true. All technology, for better or worse, is the product of the people who create it and embeds their assumptions and biases.

The Birdbrain Technologies website makes the point about looking at AI in the context of addressing questions of curiosity, creative problem solving and real world learning. According to the website:

Deep and joyful learning means digging into questions and issues that make students feel curious and passionate – and artificial intelligence certainly fits the bill!

Photo by Norton Gusky CC BY 2.0

In a course co-taught by Computer Science Chair David Nassar and Social Studies Chair Michael Naragon, Winchester Thurston students examine the dynamic ways in which social relationships and political policies shape and are shaped by technological changes. This interdisciplinary approach, according to Naragon, allows students “to become citizen-coders who understand the inner workings of A.I., which is often a black box to many.” This understanding helps students exercise greater amounts of agency, which in turn encourages them to become true “ambassadors.” According to David Nassar: 

This will enable them to better predict the possible social and political consequences of technological change. Data science is becoming such an essential aspect to digital literacy today; it is critical that students are exposed to the way in which AI and Machine Learning work and are used so that they can employ it themselves when needed, and also vet when it may be misused.

How is AI incorporated into K-12 programs and projects?

For the past two summers Lance Lindauer has spent time with high school students that are part of the Readiness Institute at Penn State. The Readiness Institute runs a five week summer program for upcoming seniors in high school. According to Lance the program tries to provide students with real world needs rooted in emerging-technology trends and data. Lance works with the students to understand the link between AI and digital technology and how it can interact with informing public policy, guide regional strategic decision making and investment, or boost education curriculum. In another school program, PART works with local middle schools and high schools on how to comprehend innovation and various technology topics by facilitating student-centered learning through podcasting.  PART is working with local entities like Future Grind and the team at the Saturday Light Brigade (www.slb.org), a Pittsburgh-based multimedia non-profit, to express their point of view. Students not only gain insights into AI and the related technologies, but develop agency.

The Readiness Institute also runs a 4 week Saturday program during the school year as part of the Mark Cuban’s Foundation for AI Bootcamp. According to the RI website: Over the course of four half-days, students learn what AI is and isn’t, where they already interact with AI in their own lives, the ethical implications of AI systems, and much more. The Bootcamp brings local AI experts from universities and local companies to work with the students. The program has four components:

  • identify AI in the real world
  • build their own application
  • discuss AI ethics and bias in data
  • meet and learn from AI experts

Bambi Brewer created for Birdbrain Technologies a series of free resources that teachers, parents, or learners can tap into. The resources require the use of one of the physical robots – the Finch or Hummingbird – that Birdbrain developed with CMU:

Bambi shared one fun example of how students can gain insights into “image recognition,” one of the byproducts of AI:

“…the funniest example to create was using image recognition to detect different Star Wars characters and control what the robot does based on the character that appears. For example, it plays Darth Vader’s music when it detects the Darth Vader mask.”

David Nassar (left) and Michael Naragon (right) engage in conversation with their students about binary classifiers in their co-taught course, Machine Learning and the Social Implications of A.I., at Winchester Thurston School.

At the Winchester Thurston School, a K-12 independent school in Pittsburgh, high school students are immersed in a course in Machine Learning. The course is a cross-discipline look at the impact of Machine Learning, one of the essential elements of Artificial Intelligence, on society and students’ lives. The topics that the course investigates are not limited, however, to the high school. Students throughout the K-12 program investigate the impact of AI/Machine Learning on their lives. This investigation culminates in a course with an original research project which is overseen by Naragon and Nassar. According to David Nassar who has been working on the course for four years with Michael Naragon: 

“We have had students create full-scale research projects exploring how A.I. is used for facial recognition, classification of words used in presidential speeches, classification of hate speech in tweets, making medical diagnoses, and even predicting lifespans. We have had larger discussions on the use of A.I. and machine learning in the criminal justice system, the self-driving car industry, and in advertising. There are so many uses to A.I. and Machine Learning, and each year we seek to find novel ways to let our students explore them.”

Summary:

Artificial Intelligence has gained quite a bit of media coverage, but what we really want is for students, parents, and teachers to understand the role and responsible use for all digital technologies. As Bambi Brewer explains, “ The goal isn’t for advanced CS students to learn how to create the algorithms (even though that is interesting too), it is for anyone to be able to understand what AI is, and what programs that use it can and can’t do well.”

Emma Hance, the program manager and strategic planning specialist for the Readiness Institute states: AI and algorithms are shaped by the individuals who create them, so if we truly want to move toward a more equitable future, we need to have a diverse group of individuals involved at every step in the development process.

What’s Working During COVID

While many people have been concerned about the lack of learning during the COVID period, there have been a number of successful strategies and approaches.  Through a dialog with regional educators, my contributions to the work for the Consortium of Schools Networked (CoSN), and listening to personal stories from 2020 HundrED Virtual Innovation Summit, I’ve compiled a list of successes. In this posting, I’ll share some of the ideas I’ve discovered. We’ll look at how at one school in Pennsylvania has students working together in teams and collaborating even with remote learning and social distancing. We’ll hear from an online trainer how the pandemic has opened new learning doors for active learning for students, parents, and educators. We’ll hear from one edtech company that has made robotics a remote hands-on experience for all learners. We’ll discover a school district in California that has found ways to continue to expand the expertise for their professional learning community. Finally, we’ll discover how an African non-profit has had to be pivot to continue to deliver its entrepreneurial program for learners.


Collaboration and Working as a Team

Melissa Unger, the K-2 STEAM Teacher for the South Fayette School District, has been an educational leader for the past decade. The pandemic forced her to rethink how she designs learning experiences, especially to promote collaboration and team-building. According to Melissa, “Being in a Hybrid setting and social distancing has caused us to rethink what it means for students to work together and collaborate. One of the best tools I have used for this is FlipGrid–students are able to share their work, thoughts, or ideas via short videos, and others can comment. In each homeroom, students have only met half of their classmates in person this year, so FlipGrid has allowed for a greater sense of community building and information sharing. I have watched students use others’ videos as a way to add on to their own ideas and form connections. 


“I also think that now more than ever open-ended projects and STEAM tasks are really important for our students. These projects and tasks address an uncertainty that students need to understand – an uncertainty about the virus, school closures, and just what’s going to happen each day. With open-ended projects, I think students start to see that having all the information is not always necessary before moving forward. This new learning situation builds confidence and resilience during this time of uncertainty.”


Active Learning

Active learning is always an important goal. In order to achieve learning engagement it’s critical to think about instruction design. According to Kelesy Derringer, the Co-founder of CodeJoy LLC, ” The job of an educator is not to simply transmit information, but to design educational experiences. Even in online learning, this is still the job, though our delivery method has radically changed. In our classes at CodeJoy, we continue to ask, “What are the students DOING?” We offer opportunities to do more than listen – students can code and control robots, build their own catapults at home with craft supplies, engage in the Engineering Design Process together, talk to a live puppet, ask a florist to cut a rose in half to see what it looks like, strap a phone camera to a horse and go for a ride, or have a dance party with children all over the world! Engagement looks different online, but it should still be the cornerstone around which educators design their learning experiences.”

Lock downs and social distancing requirements have created serious challenges to hands-on robotics education, but also inspired creative solutions, such as 1:1 robotics and remote robots. According to Tom Lauwers, the CEO and Founder of Birdbrain Technologies, “With 1:1 robotics, all students have a robotics kit at home, and use remote collaboration tools like the newly released micro:bit classroom along with teacher-led video instruction to learn coding and robotics. Remote Robots is a new technology that we’ve developed to allow kids to code a robot in a beginner-friendly environment that is not located in the same location as them. We quickly created five 24/7 live-streamed robots in April that anyone can code, and have also created a tutorial for educators to set up their own remote robots. Together, 1:1 robotics and remote robots provide educators with a toolbox to continue physical computing and robotics education in these pandemic times.”

Creating a Professional Community

CoSN for the past three years has assembled a global team of advisors to look at Innovation in Education. I’ve been part of the CoSN Driving K-12 Innovation advisory team. This year in addition to the normal Hurdles, Accelerators, and Tech Enablers, we began to look at examples of innovation due to the COVID situation. Phillip Neufield, the Executive Officer for the Fresno Unified School District in California shared his insights with the CoSN community. According to Phillip, “Over the past five years, our district has moved to more experiential, actionable professional learning where teachers experiencing their learning as we intend teacher practices to land as learning experiences for their students (albeit with adult learning wisdom applied).”


“So in spring we delivered over 100 webinars to prepare teachers for the shift to distance learning with over 1,700 educators participating, some up to 3-5 times in different webinars.  Educators could access recorded sessions.  And we offered competency-based on-demand web training resources with over 10,000 unique visits.”


“We repeated this approach in summer to prepare educators for fall.
We found educators were bringing these new teaching practices back to their grade-level or department-level professional learning communities (teaching practices included the know-why, know-how, and tech mediated activities).”

Creative Pivoting

The problems learners, parents, and educators face in the United States due to the pandemic are truly global. During the Virtual HundrED Innovation 2020 Summit I listened to an African educator, Frank Omana, outline how his non-profit, EDUCATE!, pivoted.

Educate! tackles youth unemployment by partnering with youth, schools, and governments to design and deliver education solutions that equip young people in Africa with the skills to attain further education, overcome gender inequities, start businesses, get jobs, and drive development in their communities. With the appearance of COVID this skill-based model for entrepreneurial studies had to find a distance learning option

Frank and his team created “The Experience on Air.” They began to broadcast on national radio and available via text messaging. They kept the core components – practical experience with mentorships, skills, and assessments. Remarkably the pivot opened new doors for the African learners using the distance learning model.

In each of the cases I’ve outlined new doors opened, while old gateways were no longer available. In today’s world, that’s the lesson we all need to understand. We need to be nimble and pivot so we can maintain our educational goals like Birdbrain, CodeJoy, Frenso, or the South Fayette School District. The real test is how well are we meeting the needs of our learning community.

Teaching Online in a Time of the Coronavirus

With all of the world moving to an online style of teaching and instruction, I’m worried how well our educators are designing their learning lessons. Recently I read an excellent article in the March 2020 ASCD Education Update, Six Teacher Moves for Deeper Learning.

For this article I’ve invited some of my educational colleagues to share how they’re redesigning learning to take advantage of the online platform that is their only choice right now for instruction. I think the key for any good instructional design is to have a framework that provides guidelines. I’ll take ideas from my colleagues and wrap them around the core principles that Monica R. Martinez and Dennis McGrath outline in their article focusing on Deeper Learning.

Empower students as learners.

According to Martinez and McGrath, “Given the social and economic world they will be entering, today’s students need much less passive rule following and rote memorization, and much more guidance and support in becoming self-directed learners. A common practice that all the schools focus on is helping students take responsibility for their own learning and the learning of others. They do this through both their culture and pedagogy.”

What does that look like in an online world where students are home due to the Coronavirus? Melissa Unger, a K-2 STEAM teacher for the South Fayette School District, near Pittsburgh, and Elementary Tech Integrator, Anne Blake, have developed a series of Design Challenges using ordinary materials. The projects can be done with parents, care-givers, or even by the kids by themselves. How many kids turn to YouTube to learn something new? Melissa has tapped into a tool that most young learners already use on their phones, tablets, or computers.

Contextualize knowledge.

Martinez and McGrath follow the tradition of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. We need to start by asking what are the Driving or Essential Questions. We need to think about how the learning is part of an interconnected fabric. We need our students to not just focus on facts, but the key ideas, relationships, and skills.

For instance, David Dulberger, an educator in the Frederick, Maryland County School District, is reaching out to his colleagues to share ways to improve the way they conduct formative assessment to document the key ideas, relationships or skills that students are learning . David has seen the success of using time-lapse video with students. David started letting students make time-lapse videos during indoor recess with a dry erase board. This eventually led to a realization that problem solving on a dry erase board + time-lapse video could equate to a great formative assessment. Why would this work during the Coronavirus Pandemic? Today almost all students have access to a phone where they can shoot and edit their own videos. The teachers just need to give the students a good example, like David has done.

What exactly is a silent solve video?

According to David, “A silent solve video requires students to demonstrate their thinking without any recorded narration. Students are welcome to talk out loud while making a video but the sound will not be captured when using time lapse. Jen Knox has started to use silent solve videos with her students. See an example by clicking here: Skyy’s Video”

Connect to Real World Experiences

When our students are in social isolation, how do we make them see the real world connection? Jill Tabis, a high school business education teacher and former colleague of mine at the Fox Chapel Area School District, reached out to people around her to do just that. I heard the call and used the opportunity to develop a video around Building an Entrepreneurial Mindset using my experience as an educational technology broker for the past nine years. Jill’s class will have a chance to pose questions for me and then I’ll follow up with a Zoom session to talk about their questions.

Inspire students by customizing learning experiences.

With all students at home, what can a teacher do to make each learning experience personal to the individual student? This doesn’t mean using an adaptive piece of software. It means thinking about projects that tap into personal interests or passions.

For instance, Melissa Unger challenges her online students to come up with their own solutions to the paper airplane flying challenge. Each student can test out new ideas, go online and research other options. This is one of the advantages of working in an online world.

Use tech to purposefully enhance rather than automate learning.

I’ve been a strong supporter of using technology to make students into creative producers. In my work for the Consortium of Schools Networked (CoSN), I helped to develop a paper on this topic three years ago. In the article Sylvia Martinez shared her insights, “What’s different now is the affordable, accessible and fun technology that fosters rigorous learning, Martinez says. “Today’s computational technology adds something that’s never before been available, which is putting computational power into students’ hands—programming through making devices that collect data, process data and interact with the world,” she says. “Physical computing—the interaction between the digital and the physical world—raises the bar. You aren’t able to say, ‘Oh, just making anything is good enough.’”

Birdbrain Technologies is one of the physical computing tools that Sylvia Martinez recommends. (And as a disclaimer – it’s one of my clients.) With teachers no longer in schools to tap into the Hummingbird Kit or Finch, Birdbrain is offering fun projects, live classes, and online courses to inspire deep and joyful learning for students, parents, and educators.  (Most of the workshops require a Hummingbird Kit, but there are some sessions that just use scrap materials.)

Teacher as “Learning Strategist”

Martinez and McGrath finish their set of principles by stating, “For teaching to enable powerful learning experiences like the ones described above, the teacher has to fluidly shift among a range of roles, including learning designer, facilitator, networker, and advisor who coaches, counsels, mentors, and tutors depending on what is most needed to promote student learning.”

What does this look like for the educators I’ve included in this article? Each educator had to look their target audience and create appropriate learning materials for the age of the audience, whether the materials were for a student or teachers. Short hands-on YouTube Design Challenges are perfect for young children, but not necessarily for a high school class. A 12 minute mini-lecture is not the best tool for young children, but when it brings a real world connection to high school students, it works well. Silent Solve videos are great tools for educators to use to discover that their students are really learning at home.