DataBites: An embodied and co-creative museum exhibit to foster children's understanding of supervised machine learning
Hasti Darabipourshiraz, Dev Ambani, Duri Long · Creativity and Cognition · 2024
It is essential to increase children’s understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning as they encounter it through their daily activities. We have developed DataBites, a museum exhibit aimed at fostering middle-school-age children’s understanding of supervised machine learning. DataBites engages visitors in learning about the steps and practices of supervised machine learning, using three guiding design principles: embodied interaction, creativity, and collaboration. Our design allows learners to use tangible pieces to collaboratively create their own labeled examples of pizzas and sandwiches to include in a training dataset for an image-based machine-learning pizza/sandwich classification algorithm. The algorithm can classify sandwiches and pizzas by learning patterns from people’s examples. Learners can view the results and self-evaluate how well their dataset did at enabling the algorithm to distinguish between the two items. This poster paper contributes a novel design and approach to engaging children in learning about AI in museum settings.