Creating Interactive and Visual Educational Resources for AI

Abstract

Teaching artificial intelligence is effective if the experience is a visual and interactive one, with educational materials that utilize combinations of various content types such as text, math, and code into an integrated experience. Unfortunately, easy-to-use tools for creating such pedagogical resources are not available to the educators, resulting in most courses being taught using a disconnected set of static materials, which is not only ineffective for learning AI, but further, requires repeated and redundant effort for the instructor. In this paper, we introduce Moro, a software tool for easily creating and presenting AI-friendly teaching materials. Moro notebooks integrate content of different types (text, math, code, images), allow real-time interactions via modifiable and executable code blocks, and are viewable in browsers both as long-form pages and as presentations. Creating notebooks is easy and intuitive; the creation tool is also in-browser, is WYSIWYG for quick iterations of editing, and supports a variety of shortcuts and customizations for efficiency. We present three deployed case studies of Moro that widely differ from each other, demonstrating its utility in a variety of scenarios such as in-class teaching and conference tutorials.