Constructionism and AI: A history and possible futures.

Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing, robotics, artificial game players, and generating poetry, art, and music. In the 1970s researchers explored enhancements to Logo to support AI programming by children. In the 1980s the Prolog community, inspired by Logo's successes, began exploring how to adapt logic programming for use by school children. While there have been over 40 years of active AI research in creating intelligent tutoring systems, there was little AI‐flavoured constructionism after the 1980s until about 2017 when suddenly a great deal of activity started. Amongst those activities were attempts to enhance Scratch, Snap!, and MIT App Inventor with new blocks for speech synthesis, speech recognition, image recognition, and the use of pre‐trained deep learning models. The Snap! enhancements also include support for word embeddings, as well as blocks to enable learners to create, train, and use deep neural networks. Student and teacher project‐oriented resources highlighting these new AI programming components appeared at the same time. In this paper, we review this history, providing a unique perspective on AI developments—both social and technical—from a constructionist perspective. Reflecting on these, we close with speculations about possible futures for AI and constructionism. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topicThere exist excellent broad surveys of the current status of teaching machine learning in schools, for example Marques et al. (2020). There are historical collections of AI and education research papers that include descriptions of constructionist activities, for example Yazdani (1984).What this paper addsThis paper adds an in‐depth focus on historical and current efforts on AI and education that support constructionist teaching. This focus enables us to delve deeper than a broad survey. Uniquely, we provide a 50‐year historical perspective on constructionist AI tools, trials, and research. Grounded in this history and our survey of current tools and projects, we provide speculations about future directions.Implications for practice and/or policyWe hope our descriptions of current AI programming tools for non‐experts placed in a broad historical context will be of use to teachers wishing to introduce AI to their students in a constructionist manner, as well as to developers and researchers aiming to support such teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]