Starting in 2022 I led the development of a new Deep Dive on Autonomous Robots, focused on teaching the fundamentals of reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence through tangible, hands-on activities. We partnered with subject matter experts at the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group and RAICA (Responsible AI for Computational Action) initiative to unpack abstract, technical concepts like Q-tables, reinforcement learning epochs, and the benefits and challenges of artificial intelligences vs. rules-based programming. By the end of this one-week intensive students employed AI concepts to create and program light-seeking autonomous vehicles to navigate a series of mazes of increasing complexity.
This experience and the curriculum we developed was the subject of a poster presentation at the CASEL Social and Emotional Learning Exchange in 2023 and received a $10,000 InfyMakers award for continued development in 2024.
