As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a prominent part of modern life, AI literacy is becoming important for all citizens, not just those in technology careers. Previous research in AI education materials has largely focused on the introduction of terminology as well as AI use cases and ethics, but few allow students to learn by creating their own machine learning models. Therefore, there is a need for enriching AI educational tools with more adaptable and flexible platforms for interested educators with any level of technical experience to utilize within their teaching material. As such, we propose the development of an open-source tool (Build-a-Bot) for students and teachers to not only create their own transformer-based chatbots based on their own course material, but also learn the fundamentals of AI through the model creation process. The primary concern of this paper is the creation of an interface for students to learn the principles of artificial intelligence by using a natural language pipeline to train a customized model to answer questions based on their own school curriculums. The model uses contexts given by their instructor, such as chapters of a textbook, to answer questions and is deployed on an interactive chatbot/voice agent. The pipeline teaches students data collection, data augmentation, intent recognition, and question answering by having them work through each of these processes while creating their AI agent, diverging from previous chatbot work where students and teachers use the bots as black-boxes with no abilities for customization or the bots lack AI capabilities, with the majority of dialogue scripts being rule-based. In addition, our tool is designed to make each step of this pipeline intuitive for students at a middle-school level. Further work primarily lies in providing our tool to schools and seeking student and teacher evaluations.

本文介绍了一个名为Build-a-Bot的开源工具，它可以帮助学生和教师创建基于自己课程材料的聊天机器人，从而学习人工智能的基础原理。该工具主要使用自然语言处理的技术，通过训练一个定制化的模型来回答问题，旨在教授学生数据收集、数据增强、意图识别和问题回答等技能，使得之前的黑盒式聊天机器人工具得以升级。该工具设计的特别适合中学生使用，未来的工作重心是将其提供给学校，并获取学生和教师的评估。

使用基于Transformer的意图识别和问答架构进行对话AI教学的Build-a-Bot项目