AI Education Summit Promotes Global AI Fluency Initiative

This summer, 350 attendees gathered at MIT to explore a pressing question: How can education continue to create opportunities for everyone in a world where digital literacy alone is no longer sufficient, and AI fluency has become essential?

The AI + Education Summit, organized by the MIT RAISE Initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education), took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event featured speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Notable activities included the “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams—both novices and veterans of MIT App Inventor—competed to develop climate change solutions in just one day.

In their opening remarks, RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal articulated new objectives for AI fluency in education. “Education is not just about acquiring knowledge,” Klopfer stated. “It’s a holistic developmental journey. We need to reimagine how we empower teachers to be more effective. Teachers need to engage in the AI dialogue.” Abelson stressed the importance of computational action’s immediate impact, noting that today’s students possess capabilities that previous generations could only learn about. Breazeal expanded on AI-supported learning, highlighting the necessity for classroom robot companions to complement rather than replace traditional methods. She emphasized: “We aim to ensure people grasp the functionality of AI and can design it ethically. It is imperative for a diverse population to harness AI to address critical community issues.”

The summit highlighted the achievements of invited winners from the Global AI Hackathon. Prizes celebrated innovative applications across two categories: climate sustainability and health and wellness. Winning projects included solutions like sign-language-to-audio translation, moving object detection for the visually impaired, empathy-building interactions with AI characters, and personal health assessments using tongue images. Participants engaged in hands-on demonstrations for MIT App Inventor, explored the “playground” for social robots from the Personal Robots Group, and attended an educator professional development session focused on responsible AI.

By bringing together individuals of all ages and varying professional backgrounds, the summit facilitated the exchange of innovative ideas for participants to expand upon at home. Conference papers presented real-world case studies of AI integration in educational settings, including extracurricular initiatives, considerations for student data privacy, and large-scale experiments conducted in the United Arab Emirates and India. Plenary speakers addressed topics such as funding AI in education, the role of state governments in supporting adoption, and the challenges of utilizing generative AI in education, as discussed in the keynote speech delivered by Microsoft’s Francesca Lazzeri. Lazzeri proposed the development of toolkits focused on principles such as fairness, security, and transparency, stating, “I truly believe that mastering generative AI should concern everyone, not just computer science students.”

Leading the Charge in AI Education at MIT

Integral to the advancements in early AI education has been the support from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longstanding partner that aided MIT in initiating computational action and project-based learning well before AI became a central educational framework. A summit panel discussed the history of the CoolThink project, which implemented AI learning in grades 4-6 across 32 Hong Kong schools during an initial pilot and later sought to reach over 200 schools. CoolThink director Daniel Lai shared that the trust, MIT, the Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong aimed to seamlessly integrate this into the educational framework without overloading teachers with an additional curriculum. Their goal was to ensure equitable access to essential skills and knowledge for all children.

Since its inception in 2016, MIT has played a pivotal role in CoolThink’s development. Hal Abelson, a professor and founder of App Inventor, collaborated with Lai to launch the project. Many summit participants had previously worked on this initiative, while educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed MIT’s efforts on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher training. Karen Lang, who managed the App Inventor education and business development team, developed the original curriculum materials, with input from the Hong Kong education team. Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, designed the research framework. Together, they facilitated extensive teacher training sessions for the first groups of Hong Kong educators.

Navigating Today’s Ethical Challenges in AI

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, delivered an engaging closing keynote. He likened the current landscape of AI to a “funhouse mirror” that distorts our understanding of reality and highlighted the ethical responsibilities we face in harnessing AI’s potential while mitigating inherent risks. Huttenlocher expressed excitement about the prospect of AI discovering solutions unknown to us: “One of my greatest personal interests is leveraging AI to enhance human learning. This summit has illustrated that the integration of AI and education must be a cooperative endeavor. [AI] represents a different kind of intelligence. Its function is not to replace human judgment, but to assist and extend our capabilities.”