Peer Reviewed

In an age where Large Language Models (LLMs) expedite the generation of text, the skills for critically evaluating and creating meaningful text using these models are often lacking. To help classroom teachers address this, we introduce Prompty, a specialized teaching tool co-designed to facilitate both critical and effective use of LLMs. Prompty serves multiple learning goals: it allows students to critically evaluate text generated by LLMs, aids in their writing practice, and provides a deeper understanding of how LLMs function—all within a student-friendly environment secured by essential guardrails. Prompty was co-designed in collaboration with high school teachers as part of CRAFT, an initiative by Stanford University to promote AI literacy. It was pilot-tested in a high school English class to serve as an AI writing assistant, focusing on the critical evaluation of machine-generated text. This trial yielded preliminary evidence that attests to the tool's effectiveness in fulfilling its educational goals. The findings from the pilot study indicate that easy-to-use tools like Prompty have great potential. These tools can be adapted to fit the goals of individual teachers. They can help in achieving subject-specific learning goals while serving as an effective way to teach AI concepts in high school.

High school teachers from many disciplines have growing interests in teaching about artificial intelligence (AI). This cross-disciplinary interest reflects the prevalence of AI tools across society, such as Generative AI tools built upon Large Language Models (LLM). However, high school classes are unique and complex environments, led by teachers with limited time and resources with priorities that vary by class and the students they serve. Therefore, developing curricula about AI for classes that span many disciplines (e.g. history, art, math) must involve centering the expertise of cross-disciplinary teachers. In this study, we conducted five collaborative curricular co-design sessions with eight teachers who taught high school humanities and STEM classes. We sought to understand how teachers considered AI when it was taught in art, math, and social studies contexts, as well as opportunities and challenges they identified with incorporating AI tools into their instruction. We found that teachers considered technical skills and ethical debates around AI, opportunities for "dual exploration" between AI and disciplinary learning, and limitations of AI tools as supporting engagement and reflection but also potentially distracting. We interpreted our findings relative to co-designing adaptable AI curricula to support teaching about and with AI across high school disciplines.

No abstract available.

Personal informatics (PI) technologies allow users to collect data about aspects of their lifestyle like mood or step count. Though teens increasingly encounter and use such technologies, little is known about how they ascribe meaning to their own PI activities. We report a qualitative study of the PI experiences of eighteen teens (aged 14 – 17). Following a learning phase focused on interpreting PI data, participants chose a personal goal that interested them and a PI tool to track it for 4-8 weeks in everyday contexts. Participants proved to be competent, flexible users of PI tools, tracking a range of meaningful life factors, from ‘worries’ to ‘exercise’; they valued learning about ‘natural patterns’ in their lives and were motivated to manage their emotions and evaluate whether they were doing the right thing. Our findings contribute to understanding how young people can engage in appropriation and interpretation of PI data – suggesting opportunities for educational interventions and design.

This poster presents preliminary findings from a study of four elementary-level teachers participating in a collaborative PD accompanying a CS instructional unit of seven lessons. The unit introduces students to CS concepts through an expansive framing approach utilizing board games. Through analysis of discourse, the PD and expansive framing approach appeared to support productive teacher talk that enhanced teachers' learning and enactment of the unit.

This experience report describes an approach for helping elementary schools integrate computational thinking and coding by leveraging existing resources and infrastructure that do not rely on 1-1 computing. A particular focus is using the school library and media center as a site to complement and enhance classroom instruction on coding. Further, our approach builds upon "unplugged" knowledge and practices that are already familiar to and motivating for students, in this case tabletop board games. Through these games, students can use their prior knowledge and ease with tabletop gaming mechanics to cue relevant ideas for core computational concepts. We describe a model and an instructional unit spanning across classroom and school library settings that builds upon board game play as a source domain for computing knowledge. Building on expansive framing, the model emphasizes instructional linkages being made between one domain (the tabletop board game) and another (specially designed Scratch project shells with partially complete code blocks) such that the reasoning activities and different contexts are seen as instantiations of the same encompassing context. We present the experiences of three elementary school teachers as they implemented the unit in their classrooms and with their school librarian. We also show initial findings on the impact of the unit on student interest (N=87), as measured by pre- and post- surveys. We conclude with lessons learned about ways to improve the unit and future classroom implementations.

After six months of observation at three middle school libraries and one public library implementing Maker-oriented programs, we propose four design hypotheses derived from qualitative data analysis and initial testing through design implementation. These design hypotheses address how public and school libraries serving adolescent youth can better facilitate Maker-oriented activities and are drawn from an on-going study and design project to help libraries develop interactive, technologically enriched spaces and programs to support youth exploration and creativity. Each hypothesis is illustrated with examples drawn from our observations of libraries before and after maker programs were introduced.

In large part due to the highly prescribed nature of the typical school day for children, efforts to design new interactions with technology have often focused on less-structured after-school clubs and other out-of-school environments. We argue that while the school day imposes serious restrictions, school routines can and should be opportunistically leveraged by designers and by youth. Specifically, wearable activity tracking devices open some new avenues for opportunistic collection of and reflection on data from the school day. To demonstrate this, we present two cases from an elementary statistics classroom unit we designed that intentionally integrated wearable activity trackers and child-created data visualizations. The first case involves a group of students comparing favored recess activities to determine which was more physically demanding. The second case is of a student who took advantage of her knowledge of teachers' school day routines to test the reliability of a Fitbit activity tracker against a commercial mobile app.

Recess is often a time for children in school to engage recreationally in physically demanding and highly interactive activities with their peers. This paper describes a design effort to encourage fifth-grade students to examine sensitivities associated with different measures of center by having them analyze activities during recess using over the course of a week using Fitbit activity trackers and TinkerPlots data visualization software. We describe the activity structure some observed student behaviors during the activity. We also provide a descriptive account, based on video records and transcripts, of two students who engaged thoughtfully with their recess data and developed a more sophisticated understanding of when and how outliers affect means and medians.

Novel computational technologies that incorporate aspects of youth's activities, toys and culture with more traditional computer-based technology have the potential to change the landscape of youth participation in computer programming and design. This paper describes an effort to combine and centralize these aspects and technologies into an activity called "Digible Pets". The Digible Pets project was developed to be part user-crafted touchable animal and part virtual digital pet. Crafted physical pets are programmed to interact within a virtual space through a PicoBoard. In this project, academically struggling students in an alternative school successfully designed, crafted and developed a Digible Pet over the course of five weeks. While the project was designed to encourage collaboration, students actually did little idea sharing or building within or between design groups. This paper explores how collaboration, and its potential to facilitate learning, was unintentionally constrained by both students' individual dispositions and the technology interfaces.