Prologue

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a technology is evolving faster than a lot of us imagined. Despite being a field with less than 70 years of history, Artificial Intelligence has produced so many technological advancements and inspired so many to think differently.
AI technology is embedded in various aspects of our lives–manufacturing, e-commerce, finance, education, transportation, etc. Just like every technological revolution, AI is expected to grow on a multi-faceted level, creating new ideas, new products, new jobs, and even new industries. To adapt to the new age of AI, it is important for young students to understand what AI is and what it can do. Only by understanding the technology on a holistic scope can we create a future that uses AI for good.

We believe that learning the existing AI technologies, programming philosophy, and computational thinking through AI-in-a-Box™, is far more important than learning any programming language itself. As a young student who wishes to enter the field of AI or computer science, learning these will lay the perfect foundation for future studies. As a student in general, learning these will help them thrive in the era of AI.

Editor’s Notes:

1. This version is most suitable for students from K-5. No programming experience is required. Feel free to modify the content for a different age group.
2. We strongly encourage you to get students thinking about the project from the very beginning. Creating a project, on average, only requires 2 hours of programming on the computer. The rest should be planning, modeling, etc. Therefore, it is good to combine programming instructions with hands-on activities that lead to the creation of projects. It is very helpful that they switched to a different mindset, which focuses mostly on multimedia and creativity.
3. Because of how activity-heavy this book is, the recommended student to teacher ratio is 10:1 or lower, meaning for every 10 students, you will need at least 1 teacher. If there are TAs, we recommend assigning 1 TA to about 4 groups of students at all times.
4. We strongly encourage hands-on learning with AI-in-a-Box, so ideally each student should have one set. When 2 students share one set, it is recommended that you focus on creating opportunities for both students and encourage interaction between them. When 3 or more students share one set, the learning experience, and outcome decrease drastically.

Acknowledgments

This training material will not be possible without Dr. David Touretzky’s work on the instructions of Calypso. Some of the materials regarding Calypso are taken from the original Calypso curriculum. We’d like to also thank Ada Zhang and Natalie Sauerwald, and Ray Tao, whose passion and dedication is greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer

The pictures and screenshots in this training material are taken from the Cozmo app, which is owned by Anki, inc. The materials here are not affiliated with Anki, inc, and should not be used in place of the instructions for Cozmo.