AI in Informal Science Education: Bringing Turing Back to Life to Perform the Turing Test
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AI in Informal Science Education: Bringing Turing Back to Life to Perform the Turing Test Avelino J. Gonzalez 1 & James R. Hollister 1 & Ronald F. DeMara 2 & Jason Leigh 3 & Brandan Lanman 4 & Sang-Yoon Lee 3 & Shane Parker 1 & Christopher Walls 1 & Jeanne Parker 1 & Josiah Wong 1 & Clayton Barham 1 & Bryan Wilder 1
# International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society 2017
Abstract This paper describes an interactive museum exhibit featuring an avatar of Alan Turing that informs museum visitors about artificial intelligence and Turing’s seminal Turing Test for machine intelligence. The objective of the exhibit is to engage and motivate visiting children in the hope of sparking an interest in them about computer science and artificial intelligence, and cause them to consider pursuing future studies and/or careers in these fields. The exhibit interacts with the visitors, allowing them to participate in a simplified version of Turing’s test that is brief and informal to suit the limitations of a five-minute exhibit. In this exhibit, the visitor (targeted towards middle school age children) invokes an avatar of his/her own choice, and acts to endow it with human-like qualities (voice, brain, eyesight and hearing). Then, the visitor engages the avatar in a (brief) question-and-answer session to determine whether the visitor thinks that he/she is interacting with a real human on a video conference or with an avatar. We consider this interaction to be an extension of the original Turing Test because, unlike Turing’s original that used text via a teletype, this version features a graphical embodiment of an agent with which one can converse in spoken natural language. This extension serves to make passing the Turing Test more difficult, as now the avatar must not only communicate like a human, but also look, sound and act the part. It also makes the exhibit visual, dynamic and interesting to the visitors. Evaluations were performed with museum visitors, both in backrooms with prototypes as well as on the museum floor with the final version. The * Avelino J. Gonzalez [email protected]
1
Computer Science Department, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
3
Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
4
Orlando Science Center, Orlando, FL, USA
Int J Artif Intell Educ
formative and summative evaluations performed indicated overall success in engaging the museum visitors and increasing their interest in computer science. More specifically, the formative testing, mostly done in quiet back rooms with selected test subjects, indicated that on the important questions about enjoyment of exhibit and increased interest in computer science by the test subjects, their self-reported Likert scale responses (1 being negative and 5 being positive) increased from 3.16 in the first evaluation to 4.38 in the third one for increased interest in CS. Likewise for the q
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