From Dora the Explorer to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, perhaps no television programming is as interactive by nature as children’s TV, where characters will regularly break the fourth wall to appeal to their young audience directly.
Now, kids will sometimes have a chance to chat back through a new special slate of interactive episodes from PBS Kids. The public broadcaster is working with academic partners to study how AI-assisted conversation can help enhance the educational content of certain animated series.
But rather than sometimes hallucination-prone generative models, the technology is built on top of more conventional natural language processing, meaning that all of the potential dialogue is still written by the show’s staffers.
At a time when ChatGPT in the classroom has raised questions about AI’s role in education, Sara DeWitt, PBS Kids’s senior vice president and general manager, said the goal is to explore how AI-enhanced interactivity can help kids learn more from the media they consume.
“At PBS, we’re always trying to think about what new technologies and what new media opportunities can do for kids’ learning,” DeWitt told Tech Brew. “[This technology] has so much potential for really shifting so much of the landscape.”
Backed by grants from the National Science Foundation, PBS Kids has collaborated with researchers at University of California Irvine and the University of Michigan to test certain interactive digital episodes of the science-based shows Lyla in the Loop and Elinor Wonders Why, which has shown encouraging results in terms of boosting how much kids take away from episodes.
Conversational comprehension: The basis for using AI this way comes from a concept in kids educational media called co-viewing, a decades-old idea that children retain more from a show when they have conversations about the subject matter, according to DeWitt.
DeWitt said PBS already knew from research that preschool-age kids respond aloud to questions posed to them from characters in shows like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. The goal is to build on that behavior to unlock more of those co-viewing learning gains.
“This then takes it another step, because the TV screen can then talk to the kid, the kid can respond, and the character can then have a conversation,” DeWitt said. “And so that’s more like what would happen with the parent or older sibling.”
Early exposure: PBS is also using the venue to gently introduce kids to questions around AI and tools that they will likely use in school someday, DeWitt said. For instance, one storyline in Lyla in the Loop asks kids to grapple with a scenario where a computer created part of an art project.
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“We have to think about how we are incorporating navigation of this world into our storylines for kids because we need to be thinking about the future that they’re growing into, where these are going to be very common tools and things that they’re going to have to be using in school,” DeWitt said. “We can’t pretend that kids are in a world where this isn’t happening. They’re very aware.”
It’s a beautiful day on the internet: DeWitt said PBS’s use of technology for education traces back to a model put forth by children’s programming pioneer Fred Rogers.
“He really kind of set up for us…a mandate to be looking at new technologies to see: What could you be doing if you’re coming at it with a non-commercial purpose? And what could you do with it if you were trying to center it on a child’s well-being?” DeWitt said.
Rogers not only saw the early promise of television—an emergent medium when he got his start—but also advocated for the PBS Kids website in the late 1990s, according to DeWitt.
“He personally felt like it was important to create a digital version of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe,” DeWitt said. “He was also very interested in what a more two-way communication opportunity would do for his curriculum about social-emotional learning.”
DeWitt said she’s tried to carry that same spirit through her more than 25 years working on PBS Kids Digital, as the broadcaster tackled new trends from web development and streaming video to gaming and voice platforms.
“Over all of this is a regular debate that happens around screen time for kids in general, and it’s so easy just to be like, ‘Oh, it’s all bad,’” DeWitt said. “Part of our mission and part of our job is to always be pushing on the idea that it’s a tool, and it’s a tool that may have been created for a commercial purpose….But we want people to be thinking that if it’s just a tool, what can we be doing that’s really positive with it?”