Bridging the past and future Cohort II of the Scientist in Every Florida School "Shark AI" Professional Development Workshop Take a Deep Dive into Fossil Sharks and Artificial Intelligence

By Isabelle Gain, TESI Graduate Assistant

Hoping to establish it as a core competency across the curriculum, the University of Florida has been implementing a plan to integrate the instruction of artificial intelligence (AI) into every major since 2021. With a new AI-enabled workforce, UF hopes to fuel computer-based solutions for some of the most pressing issues of our time: rising seas, aging populations, data security, personalized medicine, urban transportation, and food insecurity.

Thanks to a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the UF Thompson Earth Systems Institute's Scientist in Every Florida School Program (SEFS) is working to extend AI to Florida's K-12 educators and students and spark further scientific and career curiosities in the classroom. The secret to getting them onboard with what can seem to be a daunting topic? Shark teeth!

From July 10-14, 2023, SEFS hosted its second cohort of 17 Florida middle school teachers at UF's main campus in Gainesville for a workshop focused on bridging the fields of AI and paleontology. During the workshop, participants learned how to use a branch of AI called machine learning to teach computers how to use shape, color, and texture to identify the species of extinct shark teeth. Participants left the workshop with lesson plans that are sure to get their students excited and expose them to STEM and computer science topics.

The workshop is just one component of a yearlong professional development program titled “AI Learning in K-12 with Fossil Sharks,” or Shark AI for short. Throughout the year, cohort members will work together to share resources and best practices for lesson implementation.

This is the second year of the three-year Shark AI project, hosted in collaboration with the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, the UF College of Education and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. For more background on the program, read our press release.

Read more below for a breakdown of each day.

Monday, July 10, 2023

Learning the Basics of Artificial Intelligence

TESI founding director Bruce MacFadden warmly welcomed Cohort II of Shark AI to the Florida Museum on Monday morning. MacFadden explained how AI allows us to "cross traditional STEM boundaries" by integrating paleontology with computer science. MacFadden described his vision for a mutually beneficial partnership between scientists and teachers, where scientists can improve their pedagogy and communication, and teachers can increase their science, technology, engineering, math, and computer science (STEM/CS) content knowledge while improving student engagement.

Pasha Antonenko, an associate professor of educational technology at the UF College of Education, then introduced the concept of AI. While people often imagine AI as "a big, blue cyborg with wires everywhere," AI expands far beyond that image.

"Artificial intelligence is a computer system able to solve problems and perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence," Antonenko said. "It uses sensors and prior data to perceive the world and analyze data. It then autonomously uses this perceived data and improves its intelligence based on the data it analyzes."

David Reed, associate provost for strategic initiatives at UF and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, then led the group through UF's goal of building an AI university. Reed emphasized the growing need for an AI-fluent workforce, as there is a 75% growth in AI-related employment despite the fact the US is currently facing an AI workforce shortage. He explained that through programs like Shark AI, the University is supporting AI instruction in K-12 classrooms across the state by establishing a learning standards framework.

Sadie Mills, program coordinator at TESI, then led the cohort through an interactive learning session. Speaking on crowdsourced applications, including iNaturalist, Seek, and Merlin Bird ID, Mills explained how these applications use spatial, auditory, and visual data to identify animals.

As the cohort downloaded these apps to their mobile devices, they explored the Florida Museum's outdoor areas to capture audio and visual wildlife data with their phone cameras. They then uploaded their entries.

While some teachers had luck in identifying the bird call of a cardinal, some got some puzzling results. When teacher Donale Cochran submitted a photo of a taxidermized mountain lion, SEEK suggested that the specimen was either a domestic dog or camel. This trial identifying wildlife demonstrated one central theme of the week's AI lessons: AI is only as powerful as the person interpreting its results. The mobile app addresses this issue in machine accuracy by requiring community members to verify the specimen identification until they come to a consensus, at which point the specimen is then officially identified by the app. From this, the application can improve its accuracy through reinforcement learning. This concept points to the necessity of training students to become fluent in AI applications as their uses grow in the coming years.

The cohort then spent the afternoon touring the Florida Museum of Natural History’s exhibit, Florida Fossils: The Evolution of Life and Land with MacFadden and Victor Perez, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Both group leaders lent their paleontology expertise on the tour as the cohort trekked through the last 65 million years of archaeological history. MacFadden highlighted how AI assists researchers in quickly identifying fossils, streamlining the excavation and identification processes.

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Datasets, Machine Learning, and K-12 Classrooms

The cohort explored different possibilities for integrating AI into their classrooms on day two. Jeremy Waisome, instructional assistant professor at the UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, introduced the National Science Foundation’s guidelines for teaching AI in K-12, referred to as “AI4K12”. These guidelines consist of “5 Big Ideas” that every student should know about AI and what they should be able to do with it. These 5 Big Ideas of AI are summarized by perception, representation and reasoning, learning, natural interaction, and societal impact.

Waisome shared resources for teachers to include AI and Ethics modules in their curriculum. Returning teachers from Cohort I of Shark AI then took the stage as they walked Cohort II through their challenges and successes in implementing AI-centered learning in their classrooms. The lessons they learned informed the development of the Cohort II workshop, in which scientists adjusted their learning modules based on feedback from returning teachers.

Segueing into more hands-on activities, Perez asked the essential question, “What is data?” Perez defined data as the information used to develop meaning or make decisions. It can be quantitative or qualitative. Training a dataset for machine learning involves organizing the input data into class categories. The input stages include collecting data, preparing data, choosing a model, and training the model.

Launching from this discussion, the cohort broke into small groups and began collecting data from their shark teeth kits. Assuming the role of their own students, Cohort II followed a guided worksheet to organize the teeth by color, shape, texture, number of serrations, and size.

As some disagreement arose around the best way to measure the size of the teeth, Perez reminded the teachers that output data is subject to errors due to human biases, natural variation, image quality, sample size, and data sources. Perez recommended that teachers improve their input data by increasing the sample and variability size but also find another way to classify data used by experts – in this case, by taxonomy, ecology, and anatomy.