Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of presenting our Work in Progress paper “Design Heuristics for GenAI Educational Platforms” at the ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference in Reykjavík, Iceland. As a lightning talk and poster session, the presentation offered a brief but rich opportunity to share the early findings from our new research, building on what we learned through the Ryelands AI Lab project.
Ryelands AI Lab trialled hands-on, constructionist approaches to teaching children about Generative AI. At the same time the project demonstrated the potential of Design Research as a project management strategy—adaptive, reflexive, and responsive to rapidly shifting technologies. Read more about the Ryelands AI Lab project here.
In this new phase, we asked educators: What would a usable, scaleable, and trustworthy GenAI education platform look like and what would we need to to do to turn our prototype from Ryelands into something anyone could use?
Their responses helped us define four design heuristics, which we present as a shopping list, a playful metaphor paralleling our heuristics to cupboard staples – essential considerations that will underpin and shape the next phase of this project where we will create a platform that encompasses what we learned with the Ryelands project, but packages it in a scalable and accessible way.
These heuristics offer an early framework for designing tools that go beyond novelty, supporting meaningful, responsible AI education in schools. Our next steps are to put the heuristics into practice and start developing the first iteration of the digital tool and learning resources.
This paper was coauthored with Seren Parkman, Joseph Lindley, and Elisa Rubegni, combining disciplinary knowledge from Design, Linguistics and Computing. A final thank you to all the educators we spoke to for being so generous with your time and for so freely sharing your experiences and expertise.
