Moderation Unit

Minecraft Games Unit

In the Moderation Unit, students learn about AI's utility for helping people create and moderate welcoming and inclusive online communities. They focus on how and when AI can be used to help people create welcoming and inclusive online communities, and the role that moderation plays in online communities. The unit addresses goals for:

  • AI Education: how computers learn from data and how AI can impact society in both positive and negative ways.
  • Justice and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: how to design technologies and systems with 鈥渉umans in the loop鈥 that address persistent algorithmic bias and create communities that welcome forms of expression that reflect and sustain their cultural communities鈥 values and practices. 
  • Science and Engineering Practices: students engage specifically with key practices in engineering design of defining problems and testing solutions to problems.

The unit addresses the following overall questions:

How do computers learn from data, and how AI can impact society in both positive and negative ways?

How can we design technologies that can aid us in welcoming forms of expression that reflect and sustain cultural values and practices?

Students pursue answers to these questions through the creation of game worlds in the widely popular sandbox game, Minecraft. As part of their explorations into online moderation, students train a chatbot to distinguish between happy or sad words.