Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) is excited to share one of our research projects, “Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Smart Engineering and English Language Arts in Upper Elementary Education” which is a “Research on Emerging Technologies for Teaching and Learning” (RETTL) program funded by National Science Foundation (NSF). In this project, the goal is to develop a smart device to help upper elementary students engage in basic AI/ML (machine learning) concepts without them doing any coding. We also hope that students will use the smart device to solve an engineering problem that they discover in English language arts reading materials. The goal of the approach is to encourage transdisciplinary learning at the intersection of AI, engineering, and literacy.  Lower-cost smart devices will provide lower-income communities and students more opportunities to engage in AI/ML programs.

Geling (Jazz) Xu, Tufts CEEO Ph.D. student, is working on designing and testing the program, Tanushree Burman, Ph.D. student, is developing the user interface development, Dr. Jennifer Cross, Principal Investigator, and Dr. Chris Rogers (also Co-Principal Investigator) are responsible for the research for this 3-year project.

In the summer of 2022 we ran two workshops in St. Loius where students explored the pre-trained system via LEGO Spike PRIME, learned the basic ML concepts, and developed their own projects based on the training process. We will have two more workshops again summer of 2023. We are excited to test the smart devices we developed and the new user interface.