In preparation for the meeting with your individual supervisor, refine the rationale for and scope and format of your project on the basis of any reading or thinking done over the break. What have you done, and why, in preparation for your meeting with your supervisor? What do you want to get out of this meeting? What are your significant questions?
My project idea is to create a board game which helps teach teenagers (and adults) learn about their data and AI rights, alongside ethical considerations of AI.
Over the break, I endeavoured to read Stephanie Hare’s “Tech is Not Neutral”, both for my own enrichment, and because it was recommended to me in relation to breaking down complex concepts. The book was full of ‘a-ha’ moments to me, where I saw such practicality in what I’ve been learning about in application to the real world. Reading the book made me realise the importance of tying concepts to real-world use cases, which has coincidentally been a critique of my essays thus far in writing for the course. Those ‘a-ha’ moments were recorded, and I hope to use some of them in conceptualising the board game. Moreover, I hope to make use of these use cases to tie ‘scenarios’ in my board game to real-world instances of violations or substantiation of rights.
In considering my board game, I have also been leaning on some of the starting points for brainstorming a board game that appeared in an earlier blogpost I wrote for KIPP – realising that the game needs to have some sort of goal / competitive aspect to really draw kids in, I have been considering the idea of children attempting to get rid of ‘cookies’ as the ‘winning’ point of the game. This would play on children’s love of the baked cookie, and also act as a reference to the ‘cookies’ that are collected when sites are visited. Through using ‘cookies’ as a sort of scoring system, where cookies are constantly added or removed as children play the game, it could aid in making children more aware of how cookies (or rather, data) are constantly being collected about them. However, I understand that this ‘villanisation’ of cookies will have to be approached carefully, in order to ensure that I do not create a fear-mongering effect regarding digital footprints.
Before I meet with my supervisor, I would like to review the notes from my classes last semester, which have really broadened my knowledge of AI and data rights, but also the plethora of use cases where these rights come into play. Starting with the EU AI Act, I want to break down some of those rights very simply, and bring these to the meeting with my supervisor, to help them understand the vision for my game, and get their advice on how I could go forward with the game. From the meeting, I would like to get feedback on my project idea, establish the best way forward considering our different supervision styles, and come up with the next deliverable I will submit for review. Should there be time, I would like to ask my supervisor some of the following questions:
- Where do you think is the best place to start in relation to this board game?
- Is there a way to narrow the scope which you think would better suit the board game style? A way to ‘limit’ the world of the characters in the game in relation to the broadness of this subject matter?
- Should I make the game about learning data rights, or also incorporate some ethical considerations into the game?
- Is there any literature or theories which you can think of that I can tie in to the rationale of creating this board game?
- Do you recommend any reading?
