Introducing Variational Autoencoders to High School Students
This work addresses the need for K-12 AI education by focusing on VAEs, which are often overlooked in existing curricula, making it an incremental contribution to educational methods.
The paper tackled the problem of introducing Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to high school students by designing a lesson using a web-based game, philosophical metaphors, and hands-on activities, and found it effective in teaching this AI concept based on pilot studies with 22 students.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are a compelling way to introduce K-12 students to AI education using an artistic medium, and hence have drawn attention from K-12 AI educators. Previous Creative AI curricula mainly focus on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) while paying less attention to Autoregressive Models, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), or other generative models, which have since become common in the field of generative AI. VAEs' latent-space structure and interpolation ability could effectively ground the interdisciplinary learning of AI, creative arts, and philosophy. Thus, we designed a lesson to teach high school students about VAEs. We developed a web-based game and used Plato's cave, a philosophical metaphor, to introduce how VAEs work. We used a Google Colab notebook for students to re-train VAEs with their hand-written digits to consolidate their understandings. Finally, we guided the exploration of creative VAE tools such as SketchRNN and MusicVAE to draw the connection between what they learned and real-world applications. This paper describes the lesson design and shares insights from the pilot studies with 22 students. We found that our approach was effective in teaching students about a novel AI concept.