Teaching high school students artificial intelligence by programming chatbots

Abstract

Conversational agents, commonly defined as chatbots, can be found in many places including live customer service chats, where customers communicate with a chatbot to resolve routine service issues. Children are also increasingly interacting with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational devices such as Alexa and Siri. There has been phenomenal growth of chatbots in day-to-day activities. To prepare children for future careers, there have been calls to enhance the K-12 curriculum by teaching children how to program in the context of AI. The biggest advantage of bringing chatbot application development to the classroom is that it provides an authentic, real-world context and allows s..