Dr. ZHOU Xiaofei Presents Her Paper at ISLS

The 5th Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) took place June 10–13, 2025, in Helsinki, Finland, bringing together two flagship conferences: the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) and the International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Under the theme “Educating for world-making: Envisioning and enacting sustainable solutions to global crises”, the program features parallel ICLS and CSCL tracks, invited keynotes, symposia, workshops, and interactive demonstrations designed to showcase cutting-edge research on knowledge-creating learning, co-design, and eco-social innovation in educational settings.

At ICLS 2025, Dr. ZHOU Xiaofei from SOE presented her work “Design AI for My Community: A Case Study of Collaborative Learning in a Freedom-to-Read Summer Camp,” detailing a three-day AI literacy intervention with 11–13-year-old middle school students at a community-based “Protect the Freedom to READ” summer program. Leveraging two interactive tools—BeeTrap, an AR-based application illustrating recommendation algorithms and filter-bubble effects, and Briteller, a light-based system teaching data vectors and dot-product fundamentals—students engaged in role-playing, storyboarding, and layered elaboration to co-design AI solutions that reflected their community’s values. The study found that this critical-pedagogy-informed co-design approach not only deepened participants’ conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking about AI technologies but also empowered them as advocates for ethical applications in their own neighborhoods.