Recently, a team from MIT RAISE conducted workshops at Dubai Heights Academy. The primary purpose of the workshop was to engage students across a broad age range—specifically from Year 5 to Year 10—and expose them to the potential of emerging technologies, particularly in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The workshop aimed to go beyond mere exposure, focusing on equipping the students with the foundational knowledge necessary to learn and responsibly utilize such technology, fostering a vision of them becoming informed and ethical citizens in an increasingly AI-driven future.
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The workshop featured four distinct, hands-on sessions designed to introduce different facets of emerging technology.
Workshop #1: Doodlebot engaged students by having them program Doodlebot, a social robot where kids can insert a pen and program the robot to move and draw shapes and pictures like houses and the number five. The activity focuses on computational planning and execution.
Workshop #2: Robot Movement and Personality engaged students in introductory robotics, which focus on the concept of robotic personality, teaching students to program basic movements and sounds to give their own CuteBot a character, leading to a discussion on what makes robots have an emotion whether we want them to have such.
Workshop #3: Gen AI with App Inventor challenged students to apply App Inventor components to a real-world problem, having them create an app that uses Generative AI to describe images for the visually impaired, emphasizing “Computational Action’’ for social good.
Finally, Workshop #4: Sensors, Actuators & AI in App Inventor provided a three-part deep dive into the input/output loop of intelligent systems, where students experimented with various sensors (e.g., moisture, pressure) to collect data, collectively built App Inventor code to analyze that data, and then tested different actuators (e.g., motors, pumps) to create real-world electronic responses.
This initial workshop reinforces the commitment of MIT RAISE to international educational outreach. Moving forward, the goal is to further collaborate with Dubai Heights Academy on developing comprehensive technology curriculums. This sustained partnership aims to empower the next generation of students to not only utilize emerging technology effectively but also to thoughtfully and responsibly build the future society together.