Children’s Parliament have started working on an exciting new national project: Exploring Children’s Rights and AI. Over a period of two years, our team will be working together with partners at The Alan Turing Institute, the Scottish AI Alliance, and the children and staff from four schools across Scotland to find out how children use Artificial Intelligence, what they think about it, and to get children actively involved in Scotland’s AI strategy.
We started our work with children at the beginning of the current school year, visiting all four partner schools in September and October to carry out class workshops on children’s human rights and to introduce some key AI concepts. We visited Glasgow, Edinburgh, Doune and Shetland all in the space of about 3 weeks and we had a brilliant time meeting each of the classes and starting our journey together. We were really excited by all of the enthusiasm, creativity and ideas that all of the children brought to these first workshops. The children had lots of thoughtful things to say when we talked about what children need to be happy, healthy and safe.
““If you don’t have trust, you’d need to keep a secret inside and if you keep a secret inside too long it starts to hurt inside.” – MCP, age 10
We learned a lot from the children about the rights that are important to them and about what examples of Artificial Intelligence there are that they’re already aware of.
Throughout the Autumn term, we met regularly with our team of 12 ‘Investigators’ – 3 children chosen from each school to explore issues related to AI and children’s rights in more depth, feed back to their classes, and to share their views – in online calls. During our calls, the groups of Investigators have learned more about some of the things that AI is used for now (like classifying and predicting) and have played games and done activities to help us talk about what we think is important in relation to AI. The idea of ‘fairness’ has come up quite a lot and is something we’re looking forward to exploring more. We spent some time creating images to show what fairness means to us in our last call before the winter holidays.
“Everyone should have shelter, everyone should have food, everyone should have love and family.” – MCP, age 10
To make sure we’re getting the views of all of the children in the four classes, in between each of our online calls we have been setting whole-class ‘Missions’. These have involved a mix of games and creative activities designed to keep the children informed of the issues being talked about in the calls and to gather the children’s ideas and responses.
For the first mission, we asked the children to decorate maps of their local area to show us the places that are important to them and the places where they think they might interact with AI.
We’ve got a busy few months ahead, including return visits to our partner schools and some really exciting opportunities to come in the next phase of the project. We can’t wait to find out what really matters to children when it comes to AI and to work with them to try to make sure that AI in Scotland supports children to live lives which are happy, healthy and safe.