As artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly reshapes our personal and professional lives, there are growing calls to help pre-college aged youth develop capacity to engage critically and productively with AI. While efforts to introduce AI concepts to pre-college aged youth have largely focused on older teens, there is growing recognition of the importance of developing AI literacy among younger children (ages 7-12), given that many youth already encounter and use AI regularly, but they might not be aware of it, understand how it works, or question whether it should be doing what it’s doing. In response to this critical need for AI learning experiences that can support children at this age, researchers and learning designers at the University of California’s Lawrence Hall of Science, in collaboration with AI developers at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, have been iteratively developing and studying a series of interactive learning experiences for public science centers and similar out-of-school settings. The project is funded through a grant by the National Science Foundation and the resulting exhibit, The Virtual Human Experience (VHX), represents one of the first interactive exhibits in the United States designed explicitly to support young children and their families in developing understanding of AI. The coordinated experiences in VHX include both digital (computer-based) and non-digital (“unplugged”) activities designed to engage children (ages 7-12) and their families in learning about AI. In this paper, we describe emerging insights from a series of case studies that track small groups (e.g. a parent and two children) as they interact with the exhibit. The case studies reveal opportunities and challenges associated with designing AI learning experiences for young children in a free-choice environment like a public science center.

In particular, we focus on three themes emerging from our analyses of case data:
1) relationships between design elements and collaborative discourse among intergenerational groups (i.e., families and other adult-child pairings);
2) relationships between design elements and impromptu visitor experimentation within the exhibit space; and
3) challenges in designing activities that lower the threshold for initial engagement such that even the youngest visitors can engage meaningfully with the activity.

Findings from this study are directly relevant to support researchers and learning designers engaged in rapidly expanding efforts to develop AI learning opportunities for youth, and are likely to be of interest to a broad range of researchers, designers, and practitioners as society encounters this transformative technology and its applications become increasingly integral to how we live and work.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, education, museums.