Beyond LLMs as Black Boxes: Activities and an Educational Tool Supporting Unplugged and Digital AI Learning Activities for K-12 Classrooms

This demo showcases a collection of hands-on activities, supported by a web-based tool, reflecting our research group’s most recent work on AI literacy education. Students are surrounded by AI both inside and outside the classroom, meaning that to act as computationally empowered citizens in an increasingly digital world, they should understand how text becomes data and how this data can be processed as part of complex AI systems. Our work explores this by engaging with basic natural language processing concepts and techniques as entry points to discuss and learn about generative AI. Our demo will include an "unplugged bag of words"; a digital tool generating texts using custom datasets and parameters; and wheels of words for text generation. These activities emerge from an ongoing Participatory Design process in high school classrooms where we explore how these activities can complement existing subject teaching and change students’ perception of generative AI tools.