User Generated Education

My gifted students, grades 4th-6th, selected Artificial Intelligence, as their elective during Spring, 2022 semester. (For more about this see Offering Electives to Elementary Students.) The Generative AI learning activities I describe below are part of their larger Artificial Intelligence elective as well as being part of the ISTE AI Explorations course I am taking.

ISTE Standards for Students

• Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences. Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.
• Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions. Students exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.
• Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions. Students understand how automation works and use algorithmic thinking to develop a sequence of steps to create and test automated solutions.
• Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students create original works or responsibly repurpose or remix digital resources into new creations.

The Hook

Students explore the following Generative AI technologies:

• This Person Does Not Exist https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
• Which face is real? https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/
• DALL·E mini: Generate images from text https://huggingface.co/spaces/flax-community/dalle-mini
• Image-to-Image Translation https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/
• Deep Fakes: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/01/business/pentagons-race-against-deepfakes/

Introductory Videos

Students watch the following videos to gain some background knowledge about GANS:

Warm-Up Activity: Create a Mythical Creature

Students create a mythical creature using Google’s Chimera Painter-https://storage.googleapis.com/chimera-painter/index.html. “Chimera Painter is a demo that lets you run wild by drawing out creature shapes that become fully fleshed out by our CreatureGAN machine learning model, which was trained on hundreds of thousands of 2D renders of 3D creature models.” To begin, students watch the following video. It provides a great overview about how GANS work in the context of using the Chimera Painter. Once they create their creatures, they write a short story about them. Students can be instructed that their favorite creation can be used in the next activity – their presentation assignment.

The students loved making these.

Assignment: Create a Generative AI-Enhanced Presentation

For this assignment, students are going to make a presentation out of Generative AI Art that shows the projects they created for our AI unit (see previous blog posts). An alternative can be that the theme for the presentation is decided upon by the student and/or the teacher). It needs to include AI Art, AI sounds or music, and AI Drawing or Painting elements.

To begin students experiment with and create artifacts for the following GANS. They then choose their favorite creation from each of the following for use in their presentations. Students can use Google Slides to upload their creations, and possibly add text to create a GAN-enhanced presentation.

Generative AI Art

• Deep Dream Generator – https://deepdreamgenerator.com/
• NightCafe Creator – https://creator.nightcafe.studio/ (requires a login)
• Google Arts & Culture App – https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/transform-your-photo-style-iconic-artist/

Generative AI Music

• NSynth Sound Maker – https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/sound-maker/view/
• AI Duet – https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/ai-duet/view/

Generative AI Drawing / AI Painting:

• Pix2Pix – https://mitmedialab.github.io/GAN-play/
• AI Painter – https://www.instapainting.com/ai-painter
• Cartoonify – https://experiments.withgoogle.com/cartoonify
• Dream – https://app.wombo.art/

Example Student Project