DataBites: An embodied, co-creative museum exhibit to foster children’s understanding of supervised machine learning

It is essential to increase children’s understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning as they encounter it through their daily activities. We have developed DataBites, a museum exhibit aimed at fostering middle-school-age children’s understanding of supervised machine learning. DataBites engages visitors in learning about the steps and practices of supervised machine learning, using three guiding design principles: embodied interaction, creativity, and collaboration. Our design allows learners to use tangible pieces to collaboratively create their own labeled examples of pizzas and sandwiches to include in a training dataset for an image-based machine-learning pizza/sandwich classification algorithm. The algorithm can classify sandwiches and pizzas by learning patterns from people’s examples. Learners can view the results and self-evaluate how well their dataset did at enabling the algorithm to distinguish between the two items. This poster paper contributes a novel design and approach to engaging children in learning about AI in museum settings.