Co-Designing a Critical Machine Learning Educational Program With and For Children

Speaker:

Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens

Date:

2022-02-10 12:30:00

Location:

BlueJeans Events

GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar: Co-Designing a Critical Machine Learning Educational Program With and For Children

The world is becoming increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that collect, store, and analyze our data. Such technologies improve our quality of life, but they also (re)inforce inequities and harm marginalized populations. As digital technologies become more ubiquitous, it will become critical for all young people to have a deep understanding of AI that empowers them to enact change in their local communities and globally. In this talk, I discuss how researchers and children collaborated to develop a critical machine learning after-school education program, in which children explored the social and ethical consequences of large-scale algorithm deployment and applied machine learning content knowledge. Findings show that children were able to 1) explain how biased training datasets could be harmful and 2) build robots for social good that used their own designed classification algorithms. Reflecting on these findings, I argue for the benefits of participatory design methods in designing critical machine learning educational environments, as well as the unresolved tensions that emerge.
 

Bio:

Dr. Arastoopour Irgens is Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences at Clemson University, Director of the IDEA lab, and Vice President of the International Society for Quantitative Ethnography. She is a former middle school computer science and high school mathematics teacher. Her research focuses on (1) designing inclusive digital learning environments focusing on engineering and computer science and (2) using quantitative ethnography to make sense of how learners engage with digital technologies. In her design-based research, she engages in participatory methods that actively involve teachers, students, and community partners working together to co-design digital learning environments that serve their communities.

Video is not available for this event.