Scaffolding AI Literacy Through Student-AI Collaboration in Chatbot Development

Given the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education, it is essential to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to become creators and designers of AI technologies, rather than passive consumers. A key component of this shift is to develop students' AI literacy, which encompasses not only an understanding of AI concepts but also the ability to apply, evaluate, and innovate with AI in meaningful ways. This study explores how Generative AI (GenAI) can foster AI literacy by providing real-time scaffolding in AMBY (AI Made By You), a conversational chatbot development platform. While chatbot creation provides students with hands-on experience in AI design, including natural language processing and machine learning, the quality of student-created chatbots varies, particularly in the diversity, depth, and effectiveness of their training, response, and testing phrases. To address this, we propose leveraging GenAI-driven support as a collaborator to assist students in generating richer, more contextually diverse, and linguistically varied chatbot responses through adaptive feedback and content refinement suggestions. Moreover, this study aims to develop methods for assessing AI literacy gains by analyzing dialogue interactions and log data, mapping them to established AI literacy competency frameworks. Beyond improving chatbot quality, this research also examines how GenAI-enhanced scaffolding enhances AI literacy while increasing conceptual understanding, problem-solving skills, and self-efficacy across disciplines. The findings will contribute to the design of AI-enhanced learning environments, demonstrating how GenAI can support students in developing high-quality chatbots while deepening their AI literacy and disciplinary knowledge.