← back
The Multimodal Future of Education: Stefania Druga
Takeaway
Multimodal AI tutors are inevitable; building child-facing tools like Cognimates teaches AI literacy and critical thinking before mental models calcify.
Summary
- Researcher Stefania Druga (MIT, ex-Google) argues multimodal AI can address an education crisis: only 70% of 10-year-olds can read a simple story; 60% of K-12 lost ground during COVID.
- 70% of GenAI users are Gen Z; kids now prefer AI tutors over human tutors, so AI literacy needs to start early.
- Her open-source platform Cognimates (built on Scratch since 2016) lets kids program AI behaviors and games to demystify the technology.
- Children's perception of AI intelligence varies by age — under-7s are skeptical, older kids assume AI is smarter than they are.
multimodaleducationai-literacy
Original description
We will explore how we might use AI models to combine sounds, images, and videos and create new learning activities that support critical, creative and counter-factual thinking. Showcase demos using Generative AI (Vertex API, AI studio, LearnML) to detect misconceptions in math learning, support creative coding, create simulations to test scientific hypotheses, curate and sumarize research & identiy blind spots in one’s thinking. The goal of our demos will be to demonstrate how mights we use multimodal ai to support learning activities where the agency is balanced between learners and AI and we encourage people to discover the limitations of these technologies while developing a critical use of it, know if, when and how to use it when learning new skills. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Stefania Hi! I am Stef. I am currently a research scientist in Google Gemini team working on real-world applications for multimodal language models. I was a principal researcher at the Center of Applied AI Research at the University of Chicago and graduated with a Ph.D. in Creative AI Literacies 🎓 at the University of Washington Information School. In the past I worked with Microsoft’s Human-AI eXperience Team, X Moonshot Factory, Fixie.ai. I also enjoy designing and building an AI coding plaftorm for kids which started as my master project at MIT (cognimates.me). When I am not coding & writing papers 👩🏽💻 I love trail running and rocket yoga.