Ryelands AI Lab: Collaboration with a Lancaster Primary School on Generative AI
Designed and developed by Dr Jesse Josua Benjamin and Dr Joseph Lindley in collaboration with Ryelands Primary and Nursery School in Lancaster, the Ryelands AI Lab was a series of six lessons in which two year 4 classes were introduced to generative text-to-image AI technologies (e.g., Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, Midjourney) through hands-on engagement.
The project was featured as a Knowledge Exchange case study by Lancaster University, read more about that over here.
We have also created a public-facing Miro board (Miro is an interactive whiteboard system) that can be accessed here, it contains most of the resources that we created and used throughout the project. These are free to use and be adapted, please do let us know if you do this - we can probably provide you with better versions of the files!
Two prototypes used during the Ryelands AI Lab lessons
The research team developed prototypes that allowed the students to directly interface with and use an AI image generation model (Stable Diffusion). Lessons began with familiarisation and improving technical skill with parameter settings, before embarking on the lab project: reimagining what Ryelands could be using the power of the AI image generator. The lessons ended with a discussion of ongoing, real-world debates around these technologies, such as their impact on creativity and ownership as well as the potential for misinformation.
Examples for students’ reimaginations of their school
As a major project output, the students’ reimaginations were combined by the research team into the Ryelands AI Lab Prospectus - a printed brochure that uses the AI-generated images to present a an alternative vision for the school, with the help of persuasive image descriptions written by the students. Every student got a printed copy of the prospectus to take home, a digital version is downloadable here.
The Ryelands AI Lab Prospectus. You can download a copy of the prospectus here
Overview of the exhibition setup. The long prints on the floor show the students’ weekly progress and outputs
The prospectus as well as the project as a whole were celebrated at the school with an exhibition, which allowed students to showcase what they have been up to to parents, guardians, other classes and teachers. The exhibition was featured in the Lancaster Guardian.
