Engaging Students in Making Artificial Intelligence Tools for Mathematics Education: An Iterative Design Approach

This paper presents conceptualization and operationalization of a three-stage iterative design cycle aimed at involving students in making Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for mathematics education. Grounded in the making of rule-based systems, technology development theories and child as protagonist methodology, the design emphasizes students’ involvement in AI making across three stages: task design, participatory actions, and consequences. An ongoing study with twenty high school students highlights the potential of these iterative stages in making a rule-base system. The system functions based on its simulations of students’ reasoning processes regarding: (a) hourly changes in the position of the vertices of a 2D shape to form a new shape, and (b) displayed transformation processes, including geometry modeling and constraint satisfaction. Findings from this project, revealing the operationalization of the first iteration of the conceptualized design, are presented. This covers description of students reasoning process in the form of steps, constraints, AI and mathematics concepts. In subsequent iterations, students will refine these descriptions into logics, inferences, and encoding to be simulated by the system. It is recommended that educators operationalize the initial design iteration to inform further AI-making iterations in mathematics education.