Storytelling for ML and AI Education

As smart devices and technologies with intelligent components progressively become part of more and more aspects of our daily lives, the need to understand these technologies increases. School curricula are being adjusted to this necessity. Consequently, researchers aim to find answers to what specifically and how it should be taught. Our research explores storytelling as an instrument for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) education.

Towards this aim, we created three research projects.

1. Studying existing stories in entertainment media that depict intelligent technologies (Conference Paper)
2. Creating guidelines for children’s book authors to foster meaningful and conceptually sound depictions of intelligent technology (Journal Paper)
3. Developing a storytelling game to teach children and adolescents complex concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence in a classroom environment

There are currently no open student projects or student theses.

• Lu Arn
• Prof. Elaine M. Huang
• Collaborators: Prof. Tom Yeh, Larissa Schwartz, Diana Pak

Luise Arn, Diana Pak, Larissa Schwartz, Tom Yeh, and Elaine M. Huang. 2024."Do They Act the Way They Look": Examining Portrayals of Intelligent Technology in Narrative Media from an Educational Perspective. In Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685337

Luise Arn and Elaine M. Huang. 2024. “Robots Can Do Disgusting Things, but Also Good Things”: Fostering Children’s Understanding of AI through Storytelling. ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 24, 3, Article 40 (September 2024), 55 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677613

Luise Arn. 2022. Meaningful Representation of Artificial Intelligence in Children’s Books; Stories as Instrument to Foster Early-On Awareness of Modern AI Concepts. University of Zurich. Master Thesis. Link