Artificial intelligence, chatbots, and machine learning have transformed many industries—including education. As educators facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these new technologies, you want to understand how it works, what the ethical implications are, and how to help your learners navigate AI safely and effectively.

We’ve got you covered! On this page, Science Friday shares educational resources and online discussions that investigate the world of AI. You’ll discover exciting ways to use these new technologies to enhance education and prepare your learners for the future.

Scroll down to learn more!

Livestreams | Activities | Stories

Great Conversations About AI

AI can be a complex topic to tackle, but you don’t have to do it alone! SciFri has teamed up with expert educators to lead you through the basics and offer tips to make teaching AI exciting and rewarding for your learners.

YES! You Can Use AI for Your Homework (And Other Stuff Too)

Livestreamed Thursday, October 5, 2023
Have questions about AI in your class, but not sure who you can ask? Curious about what tools are out there? Want to find out how YOU can lead the conversation about AI at home? We chatted with AI superusers creating a safe and sustainable path for the future of AI in education – they answered questions, offered advice, and revealed the possibilities for generative AI (besides working out your problem sets).

You may also enjoy the accompanying article, Helpful Or Harmful? How AI Shaped Education In 2023.

Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence

Livestreamed Tuesday, May 9, 2023
It’s a brave new world of technology as artificial intelligence breaks into the mainstream. But what will it mean for the future of education? Meet Andy Forest, Reade Richard, and Brenda Shivanandan from Steamlabs, a non-profit education-innovation organization dedicated to building AI and coding experiences for educators and their students. They’ll explain the basics of how the technology works, share tips for teaching the technology, and discuss the ethics of AI.

Watch the recording!          Download the slides!

Artificial Intelligence Educator’s Meet-up

Livestreamed, Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Science Friday is sharing new artificial intelligence and machine learning educational resources. Let’s talk about how you use those resources, or plan to use them, in your classroom or other learning space. We’ll have our AI Dream Team of educators on hand to answer questions and share their tips. Plus, we’ll share some of the fantastic work from students who explored AI, chatbots, and coding in May. Please feel free to bring any additional resources you’ve used with students too. This is an opportunity to share!

Watch the Recording!

Get Creative With AI

The best way to learn science is to do science. So we’ve worked with our expert educators to create two educational resources you can try at home or in school. As you explore, you’ll learn how popular technologies like chatbots work and discover how AI can be used in gaming. These activities will encourage and empower learners to think critically and solve problems creatively.

Interactive Game Design

Combine a visual programming language, artificial intelligence, and machine learning into an interactive game that teaches you how to code and interact with your computer using hand gestures. This project uses a pre-trained machine learning model to recognize the player’s hand so you can code an interactive game that allows you to interact with different objects on the screen. You will learn all the necessary steps to create and play the game using a visual programming language, while also gaining a deeper understanding of AI and how it works. Then you can unleash your creativity to create your own games.

Create An Interactive Game Using AI

AI For Kids: A Chatbox Exploration

In this activity, learners will open up the black box of AI and peer inside to see how it works. This lesson will help you build your understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by exploring the evolution of how we communicate with each other and, more recently, with machines. By the end of the lesson, you should have a solid understanding of how AI is powering chatbots to make them act more like humans, why we use them, and how to create one for the classroom, school, or yourself.

AI For Kids: A Chatbox Exploration

Design A One-Of-A-Kind Chatbot

Become a chatbot engineer as you design, make, and test your own AI assistant. In this activity, you will have the opportunity to create and edit your very own chatbot. To do that, you’ll go behind the scenes and learn how chatbots can understand and interact with your comments. Plus, you’ll discover some of the main reasons why chatbots are important for both the users and the people creating them.

Design A One-Of-A-Kind Chatbot

Stories To Spark Discussion

The stories below are part of Science Friday’s continuing coverage of the ways AI is sharing our society and education.

• Helpful Or Harmful? How AI Shaped Education In 2023 – Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the classroom. Students and educators weigh in on the way forward.
• How A University Is Adjusting One Year After ChatGPT – An English professor discusses how AI is transforming education, and how students and faculty alike can use it responsibly.
• An AI Leader’s Human-Centered Approach To Artificial Intelligence – Dr. Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI discusses the promise and peril of the ground-breaking technology.
• Teen Innovator’s New AI Tool Helps Create Affordable Drugs – Rishab Jain combines his passions for artificial intelligence and biotech to build a more efficient model for producing prescription drugs.
• How AI Chatbots Can Reinforce Racial Bias In Medicine – Researchers examined four popular chatbots and found they perpetuated debunked, harmful ideas from race-based medicine.
• What’s That Smell? An AI Nose Knows – A computer model can map the structure of a chemical to predict what it probably smells like.
• Why Do Humans Anthropomorphize AI? – You might intellectually know a chatbot is a computer, but it’s hard not to imagine it has feelings.
• How Will AI Image Generators Affect Artists? – AI text-to-image generators, like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, produce impressive and trippy images. But how will they change art and our society?
• Rapper And Scholar Sammus Confronts AI In Hip-Hop – A conversation with rapper and academic Sammus about what the intersections between hip-hop and AI mean for music.
• The Future of Artificial Intelligence – What questions should we ask as research on artificial intelligence progresses?