Engaging families in a 10-week, AI global competition

Abstract

The 2019 season of Technovation Families engaged ~9200 under-resourced 3rd-8th grade students, parents and educators from 13 countries. To increase program sustainability, partner implementation stipends were reduced from 2018, and the program length reduced from 15 to 10 weeks. These changes resulted in decreased participation (-14%), retention (-6%) and learning gains; the latter was most likely due to participants’ higher socio-economic levels with greater access to knowledge and technology. Successes included identifying factors for effective mentor engagement to provide social and technical capital and deployment of an effective curriculum on responsible AI inventions.