Interactive Media and Creativity - AI Sketches and Games

AI Sketches and Games introduces students to the playful, accessible side of machine learning—through tools that make pattern recognition visible and tangible in real time. Using AutoDraw and Quick, Draw!, students sketch rapidly and watch as AI interprets their drawings, building genuine intuition for how machine learning systems see the world.

Students begin by exploring what pattern recognition means: how AI systems trained on thousands of examples develop the ability to identify objects, shapes, and categories in new inputs. The explanation is grounded in what students are about to experience, making the concepts land immediately.

Through guided sketching activities, students test the boundaries of what the AI recognizes reliably and what it gets wrong—and investigate why. They generate hypotheses about the training data behind each system and test those hypotheses by exploring edge cases and unusual inputs.

The lesson introduces neural networks and image classification at a conceptual level, using the immediate feedback of the sketching tools to make abstract ideas concrete. Students develop vocabulary for talking about AI perception, training data, and prediction confidence.

The session closes with a structured reflection on what these tools reveal about AI more broadly: its pattern-matching strengths, its brittleness outside training distributions, and the human decisions embedded in every model.

ISTE Standards 1 and 5 aligned.