NSF FF: Planning: Fostering AI Literacy for High School Students and Teachers with AI-Powered Robots

Award ID: 2627611

This FINDERS Foundry award supports the creation of an affordable AI-powered robot that allows students to create new behaviors through verbal prompting rather than having to write code. Robots are increasingly common in everyday life. K-12 robotics instruction is largely limited to low-level programming and teleoperation rather than artificial intelligence technologies. The interdisciplinary team will pilot experiments with high school teachers, students, and parents to test the hardware, the AI concepts, and the fit for a real classroom environment. By lowering costs and simplifying learning, the project lowers the barriers to participation in AIpowered robotics education. This FINDERS Foundry award advances knowledge in computer science education in high school by exploring how low cost robotic platforms can teach artificial intelligence concepts to high school students. By shifting the focus from writing computer code to creating intelligent behaviors through verbal prompts, the research investigates new methods for lowering the barrier to AI literacy. The robot uses open source programming framework and a large language model to give the robot a broad range of capabilities, including language understanding and image analysis. It also incorporates speech recognition and generation services, and computer vision capabilities. The tools offers four graphical displays that help make the robots operation transparent to students, e.g., showing how the vision system perceives the world, the contents of the robots world map, and the outputs of its particle filter and path planner. The interdisciplinary team will co-design curriculum resources and measure student learning based on their ability to connect robot functions to core AI concepts to promote scalable, lowcost AIliteracy expansion. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy