School of Fun for Children in Fukushima

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

On the second three-day weekend of February in Japan, we held a physical camp in Tokyo. Given that physical gatherings have already significantly recovered, the term "physical camp" might soon feel a bit out of place. The camp, conducted in the Northwest of the Capital, saw the participation of a total of 12 elementary, junior high, high school, and technical college students from the Tohoku, Kanto, and Tokai regions.

"Northwest of the Capital," as you may know, is the opening line of Waseda University's school song. Indeed, we held our camp for the first time on the campus of Waseda University. However, February being the entrance exam season, we actually entered the campus only on the last day and spent most of our time "next to Waseda" (this is a reference to the school song of the fictional Bakada ('fool' or 'idiot') University, featured in "Tensai Bakabon", a famous Japanese manga).

The theme of this camp was the creation of AI assistants. The children created artificial partners through dialogue with an AI chatbot to assist them in their daily lives, thereby testing a new learning system that will be implemented in some classes at Keio University and Waseda University, two of Japan's top private universities, starting this spring.

Initially, as a trial to test the system, the series of AI assistants created by the children were already impressive, with some capable of turning anything into a four-character idiom or generating quotations tailored to the person they were speaking to. Following this, a World Café-style dialogue was conducted on the camp's original theme: "Creating an AI assistant that helps you become somebody, not just anybody." Ideas were pollinated across tables, and one technical college student expressed surprise, saying, "I never thought I would learn the concept of 'meta-knowledge' from an elementary school student!"

The creations after the World Café were eye-opening. For instance, the "homework teacher" assistant is a rather simple example: give it any task, and instead of providing the answer, it offers hints for solving it. Other assistants were developed to provide a ray of hope in difficult situations, assist in creating new hobbies or pastimes from favorite things, or offer cheerful and positive responses to even the most lamentable circumstances. The children shared the brilliance of the assistants they had crafted during the poster & demo session.

On the last day, we welcomed 6-dim+, an actors' collective specializing in improvisational theater and comedy, for an in-person session that matched very well with what we have been doing, as we ventured together into improvisational theater after a long time. Firstly, the interaction with AI assistants is improvisational, and the act of stepping into an unknown future without a script closely mirrors the situation the children are in reality. We ended the three-day camp with lots of laughter, made promises to meet again (since we have another camp at the end of March!), and then we all returned to our respective places for the time being. 

Links:

• Academy Camp Facebook page in English

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

On the weekend of October 14 and 15, 2023, we held our third on-site exhibition at Maker Faire Tokyo. The venue was Tokyo Big Sight in the Tokyo Bay Area. Students from Fukushima, Kanto, and Aichi, including 9 elementary, junior high, and high school students, gathered to display the results of this year's activities of Academy Camp.

This year, with the aid of what is known as generative AI, we created various things. In January's camp, we made picture books; in the February and March camps, we explored how to interact with ChatGPT; in May, we created  serious RPGs (serious games are the games with learning or other purposes beyond entertainment) by prompt engineering; in July, one of our camp's sub-leaders, a technical college student, developed another example of a serious game on Minecraft, a recycling game, which we all played as a test; and in August, we worked on automating book reports in Hakone. At the exhibition, we displayed the picture books, games, and prompts for GPT that were the results of these activities of our participating children.

What makes us proud at Maker Faire is that by wearing the "MAKER" tag, the children are reminded that they are not VISITORS in our society, but MAKERS themselves. We feel that we have had a very fulfilling year. In 2024, we will continue to support the children as they continue to create something as MAKERS.

Links:

• Academy Camp Facebook page in English