PopBots: Designing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum for Early Childhood Education
Open accessAbstract
PopBots is a hands-on toolkit and curriculum designed to help young children learn about artificial intelligence (AI) by building, programming, training, and interacting with a social robot. Today’s children encounter AI in the forms of smart toys and computationally curated educational and entertainment content. However, children have not yet been empowered to understand or create with this technology. Existing computational thinking platforms have made ideas like sequencing and conditionals accessible to young learners. Going beyond this, we seek to make AI concepts accessible. We designed PopBots to address the specific learning needs of children ages four to seven by adapting constructionist ideas into an AI curriculum. This paper describes how we designed the curriculum and evaluated its effectiveness with 80 Pre-K and Kindergarten children. We found that the use of a social robot as a learning companion and programmable artifact was effective in helping young children grasp AI concepts. We also identified teaching approaches that had the greatest impact on student’s learning. Based on these, we make recommendations for future modules and iterations for the PopBots platform.
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In-depth and prolonged hands-on engagement with generative AI technologies is needed to really pursue the development of competencies.
“Specifically, the instantiation of our exploratory study phases (see Figure 1) show that, as highlighted in other work, indepth and prolonged hands-on engagement with generative AI technologies is needed to really pursue the development of competencies.”
From Responding to Generative AI Technologies with Research-through-Design: The Ryelands AI Lab as an Exploratory Study (2024) · cites this paper as [92]
Williams and colleagues' work notes that time and exploration leads to 'better' performance.
“For instance, the referenced work by Williams and colleagues notes that time and exploration leads to 'better' performance [92]”
From Responding to Generative AI Technologies with Research-through-Design: The Ryelands AI Lab as an Exploratory Study (2024) · cites this paper as [92]
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- Authors
- Williams, R., Park, H. W., Oh, L., & Breazeal, C.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Published
- 2019-07-17
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 01
- Pages
- 9729-9736
- ISSN
- 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
- 2374-3468
- OpenAlex
- W2964603799
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 40 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 38 · 2022: 46 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 6
- FWCI
- 25.77
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.aaai.org/ (unspecified)
- Locations
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
- AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1138986, 1745302)
- Samsung
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Teaching and Learning Programming
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Educational Robotics and Engineering
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Keywords
- artificial intelligence in education, early childhood education, social robots, AI curriculum design, constructionism, learning companions, pre-kindergarten children, computational thinking
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