The AI4GA project is developing a nine-week elective course called Living and Working with Artificial Intelligence and piloting it in several Georgia middle schools. Since we aspire to educate all students about AI, the course addresses a wide range of student abilities, levels of academic preparedness, and prior computing experience, and leaves room for teachers to adapt the material to their own students' needs and interests. The course content is primarily focused on unplugged activities and online demonstration programs. We also provide small programming projects using AI tools as an option for teachers to incorporate. In this poster we describe lessons learned from initial pilot offerings by five teachers who taught 12 sections of the course totaling 299 students. We present evidence that middle school students can successfully engage with substantive technical content about Artificial Intelligence.

Under what conditions do students engaged with a virtual world come away with enhanced appreciation for science, wonderment about the world, and nascent understanding of science practice? Other researchers have shown that virtual worlds and games can foster such development and highlight design characteristics that elicit engagement, motivation, and learning. Our study examines what contributes to the changed interests and dispositions of learners as they engage with such worlds. Such understanding, analyzed over a diverse array of students learning in a variety of virtual worlds, is a prerequisite for developing design guidelines for drawing in students no matter the resources, interests, and attitudes they bring and help them learn and develop.

Youngsters engaging in designing meaningful artifacts while browsing a case library produced creative artifacts. Our pilot study highlighted three factors that seem to promote creative designs: (1) making the design ideas and struggles of others available as designers are attempting to achieve personal design goals, (2) promoting exploration of these ideas, and (3) attaching to the case library resources to promote understanding of the scientific and technological concepts behind these ideas.

In this paper, we describe how encouraging children to talk to the camera can structure their behavior and provide them opportunity for reflection. Encouraging "camera talk," interactions directed at the camera, can effectively elicit verbal comments from children participants. We describe a study in which children participants were told that they could tell the camera anything they wanted to about the designs they were making using a piece of educational software, but not to behave in a disruptive manner for the camera. By allowing children to interact with the camera in a particular way, rather than encouraging them to ignore its presence, we were able to elicit information about some children's design activities, thoughts, and struggles. The camera became an integral part of the socio-technical system for some children. This method may be useful to researchers interested in what children are thinking about in-the-moment as they work with software.

DigiQuilt is a software system intended to allow children to design patchwork quilt blocks in the context of learning about symmetry and fractions. It combines the benefits of virtual manipulatives and learning through design. In the following pages, we describe a new kind of manipulative environment with explicit support for design and math.

While much recent interest exists in the cognitive processes involved in clinical reasoning, a much-neglected area is the role of experience in diagnosis and treatment. A model of experience's role in commonsense problem solving is developed and a model of clinical reasoning that incorporates experience is proposed. Understanding the role of experience in clinical reasoning has two important implications. First, it will enable the building of better computerized reasoning systems for decision support and advisement. Such systems will be easy for clinicians to follow and will be able to take advantage of the similarities between novel cases in their reasoning. Second, it will enable the development of more effective teaching strategies that might result in more efficient learning environments and more accurate and reliable clinical reasoning. Two major contributions that experience makes to problem solving are identified. First, it provides exemplars to aid in hypothesis formation during classification, plan selection, and error recovery. Second, it triggers and contributes to refinement and modification of problem-solving knowledge. A model of the interaction between problem solving and experience is presented, including reasoning processes that make use of previous experience and a well-developed memory model that allows retrieval of individual experiences from memory as needed. The components of clinical reasoning are placed into the problem-solving model and thus propose places in the clinical reasoning cycle where one expects to see each experiential reasoning component.

Researchers in artificial intelligence have recently become interested in natural language fact retrieval; currently, their research is at a point where it can begin contributing to the field of Information Retrieval. In this paper, strategies for a natural language fact retrieval system are mapped out, and approaches to many of the organization and retrieval problems are presented. The CYRUS system, which keeps track of important people and is queried in English, is presented and used to illustrate those solutions.