Youth Digital Writing Camp: Engaging Young Writers as Designers with AI Tools

• In Event: Tinkering With/Tripping It Up: Youth Shift, Interrupt, and Challenge Conceptualizations Around Their AI Use.

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares an action-research project to understand the ways iterative design (e.g., DBCR, 2003) enlisted young writers alongside teachers as critical digital creators discovering the potential of AI tools. In this project, 21 youth engaged in using AI tools to support their writing during a week-long summer camp and follow up workshop. Youth considered the ways AI tools might shape their writing in order to assert their theories and ideas about making with AI both in and out of school. We asked: How do writers engage with AI tools within the context of a creative writing workshop? And how do writers theorize about AI tools and their potential in aiding writing and making?


Perspectives
In this project, we (Author 1, a teacher and coach, and Author 2, a researcher and assistant professor) designed and implemented two AI workshops for high school aged young writers. We draw from sociocritical work that positions youth as capable makers, able to theorize around the digital landscape in which they live (e.g., Authors, 2022). Workshop design centered the ways young writers engage playfully and experimentally with AI (Authors, 2024). In this piece, we are interested in the ways young writers both critique and engage with AI tools expertly in their writing (Author, 2018; Garcia & Mirra, 2017).

Methods
During the initial workshop, we led 21 young writers to train an AI chatbot to act as fictional characters, and to create fictional skits featuring those characters. We collected field notes, audio recordings, digital artifacts, and interviews with each participant. We asked youth to co-design the second workshop, inviting young writers to experiment with new tools and use their expertise as writers and creators to revise the AI’s output. Our initial analysis included rounds of memoing and coding as we reviewed the data, seeking cross-cutting themes in the young writers’ discussions of AI as a tool for writing.

Findings & Significance
Initial findings illustrate the ways young writers took critical stances when using AI tools, probing the capacities of the tools they used, while questioning the ethics of AI. We were interested in the repeated attempts to generate responses that would show the tools’ limitations. We found that every participant in the second workshop articulated satisfaction in winning arguments with AI chatbots and exposing the kinds of errors the tools might make. Ultimately, this paper will present the ways young writers played and experimented to socially develop theories (e.g., Authors, 2022; Werstch, 1991) of how AI tools might help creative writers and what the increasing presence of AI in our lives and our schools might mean for youth as they create and write with digital tools. The young writers’ experiences, ideas, and emerging theories have implications for the ways teachers and researchers might leverage collaborative instructional design to center youth as digital creators on the forefront of learning with AI.

Authors

• Joe Dillon, Aurora Public Schools

• Kristina M. Stamatis, University of Nebraska Omaha