AI technologies have long-term societal implications that impact youth, prompting a need for critical AI literacy for students. While current K-12 AI curricula have increasingly integrated societal impact and ethics concepts in AI curricula, there is a need to center youth’s agency in decision-making around AI systems that impact them. In this work, we engaged 94 middle and high school art students in a Policy Design learning activity as a part of an Art and AI learning workshop. Students worked in groups to create policies around AI's use in art, considering stakeholders like artists, AI companies, and consumers. Findings revealed that students developed nuanced, actionable policies that reflected a deep understanding of AI's impact on the art ecosystem, including issues of copyright, artist compensation, and transparency. The activity empowered students to think critically about AI’s ethical implications on various systems in the AI and art ecosystem and fostered a sense of agency in shaping its future. This work demonstrates the value of integrating policy design into K-12 AI curricula, providing youth with the skills and perspectives to become informed, ethical citizens in an AI-driven world.

The growing impact of AI on various fields, including art, highlights the importance of integrating AI learning into art education. This work investigates whether traditional art lessons can be adapted to meaningfully incorporate AI, focusing on its application to art-making practices. We adapted a character design activity to incorporate AI at different stages, such as using AI for creating references, getting feedback, visual design, animation, and personality design. We developed a character design learning activity which was supplemented by a code notebook and a front-end character design tool. 39 middle and high school students participated in this activity during two in-person Art and AI workshops. Analysis of creative outputs, knowledge surveys, and classroom discussions showed that students showed significant shifts in their understanding of AI as a creative collaborator, their art making practice, and their confidence with using AI tools. Learners demonstrated different creative styles while adopting AI into their character design. This approach demonstrates the potential for integrating AI into art lessons and offers a scalable framework for other non-CS subjects.

This research designs and applies inclusive child-robot interactions for collaborative creativity, where elementary school children and a social robot collaboratively create and publish picture stories. The robot offers creativity scaffolding during parts of the creative process of storytelling through social interactions such as feedback, question asking, divergent thinking, and positive reinforcement. The collaborative tasks and robot interactions are personalized for neurodivergent children's unique needs. Through a five-session user study with 32 children (ages 5–9) over 8 months, we investigate the impact of the social robot on children's exhibited creativity in storytelling over time, their creative interactions with the robot, and their perceptions of the robot as a creative collaborator. Our research revealed that inclusive design practices eliminated creative barriers for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The robot's creativity scaffolding interactions positively influenced children's verbal creativity in storytelling, and had an influence on their storytelling creative process. After multiple sessions interacting with the robot, we observed the emergence of diverse creator styles among neurodivergent learners. We propose Inclusive Co-creative Child-robot Interaction (ICCRI) guidelines for fostering creativity in children, and accommodating diverse creator styles in complex, open-ended creative tasks.