Building AI Literacy and Confidence Through Community-Based Learning

"This study describes an AI-coding hackathon designed to cultivate an inclusive and innovative learning space where students collaborate to solve real-world community problems. The project emphasizes student agency, encouraging students to identify community problems, choose AI tools independently, and continuously revise solutions based on expert and group mentors' feedback."

Excerpt adapted from AI-Coding Hackathon: Designing an Innovative Learning Space for Building a Better Community, published in the conference of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2025, Italy.

Project Team

The current education system urgently needs innovative learning spaces to help students develop the ability to solve real-world problems and improve their adaptability in the complex era of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). This study describes an AI-coding hackathon designed to cultivate an inclusive and innovative learning space where students collaborate to solve real-world community problems. This project is designed according to Knowledge Building (KB) pedagogies, combined with AI-assisted learning support tools and chatbots, to provide low SES students with learning scaffolds to help them develop programming and problem-solving abilities.

The AI-coding hackathon program is structured to guide students through basic machine learning concepts, basic Python programming syntax, and developing projects and solutions using prompt engineering to create an AI-supported application (digital books, chatbots, simple trained Machine Learning datasets) as the final product. The project emphasizes student agency, encouraging students to identify community problems, choose AI tools independently, and continuously revise solutions based on expert and group mentors' feedback. This study proposes a new pedagogical application, Knowledge Building, for AI education to promote a more equitable and meaningful AI learning experience.

Findings of this study show that low-SES students improved AI literacy and confidence when learning occurred in an idea-centric space guided by Knowledge Building pedagogies and supported with age-appropriate AI tools. Metacognitive scaffolds (e.g., Journey of Thinking in Knowledge Forum) made idea improvement visible and supported reflective growth. 

Recommendations for Schools:

1. Adopt AI Hackathons: Run termly 3-day programs using Knowledge Building pedagogy to engage students in solving authentic community-related problems.
2. Use scaffolded AI supports: Provide child-safe facilitator bots and curated toolkits to lower entry barriers and guide AI interactions.
3. Ensure targeted mentoring: Assign more mentors for younger students and involve facilitators and experts to strengthen engagement and content understanding.
4. Embed reflection and ethics: Incorporate structured reflection tools and short lessons on safe and responsible AI use to foster critical digital citizenship.

Resources

NIE website: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/nie/news-events/news/detail/ai-coding-hackathon-2024 

 Selected Talks:

• School Libraries and Librarians Matter, Online Talk for The Open University’s Centre of Literacy and Social Justice. AI Meets Education: A Glimpse of Research and Real-World Impact. Online Workshop, NIE Graduate Research Conference, 2025

 Selected Articles:

• Yuan, G., Ong, M. W. L., Teo, C. L., Seow, P. S. K., Kadir, M. B. S., Lee, S. S., Das, N. & Devakishen, B. A. (2025 July). AI-Coding Hackathon: Designing an Innovative Learning Space for Building a Better Community. In: Cristea, A.I., Walker, E., Lu, Y., Santos, O.C., Isotani, S. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98414-3_13.