The rapid advancement and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our everyday lives, work, and classrooms have added demands for PK-12 education to ensure that students are given opportunities to obtain AI competencies essential for responsible participation in the AI-driven future. AI literacy encompasses technical knowledge, ethical awareness, and critical evaluation of AI tools, as well as the ability to collaborate with AI systems in creative and productive ways. Research highlights the importance of age-appropriate approaches that address foundational AI knowledge, data literacy, ethics, problem-solving, and creativity, ensuring students can both use, analyze, critically evaluate, and design AI solutions for real-world challenges. This not only requires schools to prepare learners with AI competencies, but also colleges and universities to ensure that we prepare our preservice teachers to be AI-ready, who can integrate technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge in classroom practice. This paper highlights the importance of purposefully integrating AI competencies into teacher education programs and offers practical examples of how such integration can be achieved.

It is crucial to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the development of AI and robotics. Neglecting these factors not only exacerbates existing discrimination and biases, but also continues perpetuating them over time. Despite global awareness, urgent action is needed within the human-robot interaction (HRI) community. This workshop aims to bridge the gap by providing a platform for sharing experiences and research insights related to identifying, addressing, and integrating DEI principles in HRI. Building upon its last few iterations, this year's workshop will actively involve participants in tackling human biases which can be transferred to the robots, aiming to mitigate inequity, recognize and minimize prejudice, and promote inclusion within the field of HRI.

In recent years, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has fostered an urgent need to better prepare current and future educators to be able to integrate AI technologies in their teaching and to teach AI literacy to PreK-12 students. While many organizations have developed professional learning opportunities for inservice educators, a gap remains for resources specifically designed for those facilitating and enrolled in Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs). In response to this gap, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) launched its first AI Explorations for EPPs Faculty Fellowship. As a result of the Faculty Fellows’ collaboration, this paper articulates a framework of seven critical strategies with the potential to address the urgent need EPPs have in preparing preservice teachers to effectively integrate AI-powered instructional tools and to teach this new area of content knowledge in PreK-12 classrooms. In addition, we provide a review of literature and an overview of the emerging needs for integrating AI education in EPPs. We demonstrate why support for preservice teachers’ critical examination and application of AI, including a focus on the issues of equity, ethics, and culturally responsive teaching, is essential to their later success in PreK-12 classrooms. Recommendations for further research and learning are also provided to promote community-wide initiatives for supporting the integration of AI in education through Educator Preparation Programs and beyond.

This demo presents a hands-on opportunity for users to explore a new, immersive, node-based platform for creative coding in virtual reality (VR). The Embodied Coding Environment (ECE) is a merged digital/physical workspace where coding tools, spatial representations of code, the scenes that are the output of the code, and user editing histories are co-located in a 3D space. Visual programming languages (VPL) have been used as an alternative to text-based programming since Sketchpad in 1963. However, the ECE transforms visual programming into an immersive experience, allowing users to enter the world where they are actively coding. Beyond immersion, embodied coding allows users to leverage 3D space to organize, annotate, and interact with their code in ways that would not be possible through 2D representation. Our research goals center on understanding how embodied coding can make learning to code more intuitive and elicit heightened engagement through the learning process. Demo visitors will experience embodied coding first hand through simple programming tasks (e.g., spawning objects, using arrays, creating conditional statements, and more) presented in the ECE via a Meta Quest 2 system. Presenters will guide users through the coding activities and discuss future directions. Handouts with brief descriptions of the ECE platform with links to embodiedcode.net will be available. Access to the website will allow users to login and save their projects.

Eight middle- and high-school Computer Science (CS) teachers in San Diego County were interviewed about the major challenges their students commonly encounter in learning computer programming. We identified strategic design opportunities -- that is, challenges and needs that can be addressed in innovative ways through the affordances of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). Thematic Analysis of the interviews yielded six thematic clusters: Tools for Learning, Visualization and Representation, Pedagogical Approaches, Classroom Culture, Motivation, and Community Connections. Within the theme of visualization, focal clusters centered on visualizing problem spaces and using metaphors to explain computational concepts, indicating that an AR/VR coding system could help users to represent computational problems by allowing them to build from existing embodied experiences and knowledge. Additionally, codes clustered within the theme of learning tools reflected educators’ preference for web-based IDEs, which involve minimal start-up costs, as well as concern over the degree of transfer in learning between block- and text-based interfaces. Finally, themes related to motivation, community, and pedagogical practices indicated that the design of an AR coding platform should support collaboration, self-expression, and autonomy in learning. It should also foster selfefficacy and learners’ ability to address lived experience and real-world problems through computational means.