Research Projects

StoryAI: AI-powered story-authoring platform for young learners

February 01, 2023

StoryAI is an educational content creation platform for teachers, parents, and their students in K to 8th to support scaffolded, culturally responsive, and open-ended story creation for literacy development. To support adaptive learning experiences tailored to the individual needs of each child. Our platform integrates educators-in-the-loop with AI methodologies, where educators create lessons for their students, which AI agents can carry out on their behalf. The platform generates mentor texts and AI agents that guide students through the writing process (i.e., choosing a topic, structuring their papers, receiving immediate feedback, and sharing their work with others). Educators will be able to find inspiration, ideas, and assistance in their teaching, especially in promoting the craft of writing, including comprehension and critical thinking; students will be able to gain proper guidance based on their interests and their level through child-centered exploration and open-ended writing projects with the help of AI agents.

Understand teachers, parents, and students perspectives towards generative AI

January 01, 2023

The viral launch of new generative AI (GAI) systems, such as ChatGPT and Text-to-Image (TTL) generators, sparked questions about how they can be effectively incorporated into writing education. However, it is still unclear how teachers, parents, and students perceive and suspect GAI systems in elementary school settings. We conducted a workshop with families with children ages 8 to 12 and interviewed teachers in order to understand each stakeholder’s perspectives and opinions on GAI systems for learning and teaching writing. We found that the GAI systems could be beneficial in generating adaptable teaching materials for teachers, enhancing ideation, and providing students with personalized, timely feedback. However, there are concerns over authorship, students’ agency in learning, and uncertainty concerning bias and misinformation. In this article, we discuss design strategies to mitigate these constraints by implementing an adults-oversight system, balancing AI-role allocation, and facilitating customization to enhance students’ agency over writing projects.

Computing Education through Storytelling and Maker activities

March 01, 2022

, AERA, Irvine, CA

C-Accel “Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier” Funded by National Science Foundation (#1839896) Investigators: Dr. Karthik Ramani, Purdue University; Dr. Kylie Peppler, University of California, Irvine; Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Conducted user-testing (focus group workshops), planning and creating workshop settings Writing literature reviews to support writing publishable papers Conducted mixed-method research with video, audio transcripts and pre-post test data Data analysis with video data (qualitative) as well as pre-post tests data (quantitative: SPSS)

Data Visualization Literacy Education in Museum Setting

March 01, 2021

AISL CNS “Data Visualization Literacy: Research and Tools that Advance Public Understanding of Scientific Data, Funded by National Science Foundation (#1713567) Investigators: Katie Börner, Kylie Peppler, Bryan Kennedy, Stephen Uzzo, and Joe Heimlich, Indiana University, 2019-2020.