Community Service
My community service has focused on educational outreach where I help teach under-resourced middle school students about digital literacy and artificial intelligence. I have been fortunate to work with MIT Media Lab graduate students as part of their educational research project. I have helped to develop a new AI Literacy curriculum, student-friendly tools, and assessments that the research team brings to Title I schools in a series of 1-week online or in-person workshops. I found the teaching to be very rewarding, I enjoyed developing these innovative materials, and I admired how well the students picked up the key concepts and used them in their own projects. From this experience, I've come to appreciate the importance of empowering others to be creative with new technologies and new types of hands-on educational experiences.
Teaching Title I Students about AI
During high school spring and summer breaks, I have helped teach multiple 1-week AI Literacy workshops (over 50 hours of service and counting). The workshops have been virtual due to the pandemic. They introduce students to technical concepts about how AI works in grade-appropriate ways, give them hands-on experience with making things with AI technologies using web-based tools the team developed, and engage students in lively conversations about the societal and ethical implications of AI. I've been involved in two different workshop topics.
The Creativity & AI workshop explores how AI can generate digital art, music, text, and other expressive media. Students explore how to use this type of AI in their own creative projects. They also learn about how AI can be used to generate deepfakes and contribute to the spread of misinformation in social media. I served as an instructor where I taught the unit on Generation vs. Discrimination about GANs. When others were teaching, I helped to observe and take notes on how well students engaged with and understood the material. I also developed an assessment in the form of an interactive Kahoot game for the Generation vs. Discrimination unit material.
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The Sound of AI workshop teaches students about how machines perceive, represent, and generate sounds, where music is an overarching theme. For this workshop I played a more supportive role, leading breakout sessions, observing and taking notes on how well the students were grasping the concepts, and engaging with the activities.
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Please see the Creativity & Computation page for descriptions of the technical projects I have worked on for both of these workshops.
Research Publication
One of the most important learning experiences I've had working with MIT graduate students is the process for how to do research, writing scientific articles, going through peer-review, and eventually getting published. With deepfakes and the spread of misinformation becoming more common place on the Internet and in social media, teaching digital literacy has become even more important and relevant to younger audiences.
This research article is based on the design, analysis, and evaluation of specific learning units in the Creativity & AI workshop with 38 middle school students. In this paper, I contributed to the related work section on digital literacy, to the analysis on one of the web apps that was developed to teach students about how easily misinformation spreads in social media, as well as the analysis of the data from my Kahoot assessment and the spread of misinformation activity. The article has been publication in the Computers & Education: Artificial Intelligence Journal. I'm so excited to be a co-author!