About
Physical movement is one of the most engaging ways to interact with AI systems, but it’s rare today to see motion integrated with K-12 AI curricula. Beyond that, many middle schoolers have passionate interests in dance, art, physical movement in sports, and video games that involve physical motion (Beat Saber, Just Dance) which aren’t easy to build on in the typical creative learning environments found in classrooms. Dancing with AI is a week-long workshop curriculum in which students conceptualize, design, build, and reflect on interactive physical-movement-based multimedia experiences. Students will learn to build interactive AI projects using two new Scratch Extension tools developed for this curriculum: (1) hand/body/face position-tracking and expression-detecting blocks based on the machine learning models PoseNet & MediaPipe from Google and Affectiva’s face model, and (2) Teachable Machine blocks that allow students to train their own image- and pose-recognition models on Google’s Teachable Machine and use them as part of their projects.
The goal of this curriculum is to engage students with interactive lessons and projects, and to have them think critically about AI and natural interaction. Throughout this course, students will have open-ended discussions on questions such as:
These questions will allow students to reflect on their own abilities as consumers and creators of interactive AI, and have them think critically about the ways it can help and harm society.
These materials are licensed as CC-BY-NC under creative commons. This license allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon these materials non-commercially as long as you include acknowledgement to the creators. Derivative works should include acknowledgement but do not have to be licensed as CC-BY-NC.
To acknowledge the creators, please include the text, "Dancing with AI was created by the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab".
More information about the license can be found at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
People interested in using this work for for-profit commercial purposes should reach out to Cynthia Breazeal at cynthiab@media.mit.edu for information as to how to proceed.
This is a joint venture between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab and Amazon Future Engineer. We'd like to thank the schools that piloted with us through Amazon Future Engineer for their boundless enthusiasm and valuable suggestions in the curriculum pilot.
Dancing with AI was developed by Brian Jordan, Jenna Hong, and Nisha Devasia as a part of 6.S898 (Democratizing AI for K-12 Education), instructed by Cynthia Breazeal, Randi Williams, and Hal Abelson. Feel free to reach out at dancingwithai@mit.edu with any questions!