Teaching High School Students Artificial Intelligence by Programming Chatbots

Conversational agents, commonly defined as chatbots, can be found in many places including live customer service chats, where customers communicate with a chatbot to resolve routine service issues. Children are also increasingly interacting with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational devices such as Alexa and Siri. There has been phenomenal growth of chatbots in day-to-day activities. To prepare children for future careers, there have been calls to enhance the K-12 curriculum by teaching children how to program in the context of AI. The biggest advantage of bringing chatbot application development to the classroom is that it provides an authentic, real-world context and allows students to experiment with instructions as if they were talking to their friends. Artificial intelligence and chatbots are not new concepts; however, their popularity has gained traction in recent years. Using Python code snippets, this chapter looks at how chatbots can be used to teach students the foundations of programming concepts as mandated in the high school curriculum.