Learning from Experience: An Interactive and Ethical Curriculum for Teaching Reinforcement Learning

As AI becomes prevalent in society, AI education and AI literacy are also increasingly important fields. Reinforcement learning (RL) plays and will continue to play an intense role in many systems, including online advertising, self-driving cars, and personalized tutoring. There is a corresponding need for education of RL. In my thesis work, I developed activities and materials that teach RL to middle and high school students who don’t necessarily have backgrounds in computer science or AI. Then, I evaluated these materials by teaching a series of pilot workshops. The project had two main goals: effectively educating the students in the workshops, and contributing insights to the ongoing research of AI education. In this thesis, I will go over the curriculum design, as well as the analysis of each pilot.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Hoekstra, Chessa Nicole

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Breazea, Cynthia Lynn

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139863

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/139863