Can Artificial Intelligence Help Students Work Better Together? According to Research, the Answer is Yes | Artificial Intelligence - WPI News

WPI computer scientist looks at better collaboration between AI and humans in today’s classrooms by Jessica Marie Messier, Public Relations Specialist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Jake Whitehill (center) is studying which AI Partners will help students collaborate better in the classroom.

WPI assistant professor of computer science Jacob Whitehill is collaborating with colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder to explore how artificially intelligent (AI) teaching agents might help encourage more meaningful collaboration among students in school classrooms.

As part of a five-year, $20 million grant awarded to CU Boulder, Whitehilll and colleagues at nine other institutions will study how to build AI agents that interact with students in small-group collaborative problem-solving settings and thereby foster more enriching learning experiences for students.

There is so much evidence that students learn best when they learn actively and collaborate with each other in real time,” says Whitehill, who specializes in AI and machine learning. “But that’s not always easy for teachers to achieve, whether the collaboration is happening in a physical classroom or during remote learning.”...

“With Zoom, each student and teacher in the classroom is cleanly separated from each other, and all their audiovisual inputs are channeled through a common software interface. This makes it much easier to analyze their speech, gestures, language, and interactions with each other,” Whitehill says. “In contrast, in normal, in-person classrooms, the interactions are much messier,” since students often sit in all kinds of different positions, might be touching their faces, and work in a noisy environment, which makes it more challenging for the Partner to observe and analyze.

Read more...

Source: WPI News