User Generated Education

My gifted students, grades 4th-6th, selected Artificial Intelligence, as their elective during Spring, 2022 semester. (For more about this see Offering Electives to Elementary Students.) The chatbot learning activities I describe below are part of their larger Artificial Intelligence elective as well as being part of the ISTE AI Explorations course I am taking.

ISTE Standards for Students

• Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences. Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.
• Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions. Students exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.
• Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions. Students understand how automation works and use algorithmic thinking to develop a sequence of steps to create and test automated solutions.
• Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students create original works or responsibly repurpose or remix digital resources into new creations.

The Hook

Learners try out the following chatbot:

• https://chat.kuki.ai/chat

---

Video Introduction

---

Main Activity 1: A Scratch Text to Speech Language Translator Chatbot

Student Examples

• https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/669240106
• https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/669191189

---

Main Activity 2: Create a Chatbot on a Topic of Your Choice

Learners create their own Chatbots using Scratch 3.0. They are expected to research a topic of personal interest to create a Chatbot that can answer questions about interesting facts related to their topic.

Students explain the workings of the ones they created:

---

---

Extension

To extend knowledge about and coding of Chatbots, learners do the Python-drive CodeMonkey Trivia Chatbot course: https://app.codemonkey.com/hour-of-code/trivia-chatbot/course#1