Dartmouth AI:
Increasing Dartmouth Students' AI Literacy
An interactive LLM platform that guides students through AI foundations with scaling objectives and learning mini-games.
Dartmouth College
Special Advisor to the Provost for AI
20 weeks
Jan 2025 - Jun 2025
EdTech
User Research
Figma UI Design
User Testing
Systems Design
Instructional Design
UI/UX Designer
Three Designers
Three Developers
One Product Manager
Challenge
As AI becomes more widely used in our everyday lives, it is important for people to be AI literate. Educators should help non-technical users and interested people learn more about the field so that they may effectively incorporate AI use into their lives and keep up with technological advancements.
As Dartmouth Students are now entering an era where generative AI is used more prominently, Dartmouth College administration felt a need to provide accurate and accessible education to increase its students' AI literacy skills.
How might we effectively and engagingly encourage AI literacy and education at Dartmouth and beyond?
Project Overview
Our solution needed to:
1
Appeal to users with varying backgrounds in AI technologies
Students at Dartmouth come from various backgrounds with varying technical understandings. A film major will not have the same pre-existing knowledge as a computer science PHD student.
2
Accessibly incorporate high-level elements of AI and LLM technologies
As the era of generative AI is still developing, our platform needed to easily adapt to new models and updates.
3
Engage users in interactive, scalable learning to equip them with advanced AI skills and knowledge
Instead of being a platform students use once and never touch again, we want this to become a natural part of their learning toolkit, something they will reference time and time again and come back knowing there are new updates.
Design Process
Need Finding
Primary and Secondary Research
Ideation
Brainstorming and systems design
Designing and Prototyping
Figma designs
Educational Content Creation
Instructional Design
User Testing
Responses and iterations
Features
Landing Page
Clean start page with progressive disclosure of additional features after milestone completion.
The platform introduces users to its offerings and purpose through an intuitive onboarding experience. All new, unlocked features are also accompanied by beginner-friendly descriptions.
Objective-driven learning experience with progressive disclosure
Interactive learning through milestones. Complete objectives to unlock more features!
Native Split-Screen Comparison Mode and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
The platform’s split-screen feature allows users to compare different models and LLM settings, while its RAG feature empowers users to increase customizability.
Twigby
Platform mascot with specific educational mini-games about topics such as “AI and Academic History”, “Does AI actually have understanding”, and “Environmental Impact of AI.”
Content Delivery Framework
Instructional Design for planned learning objectives and the flow of courses to build upon each other.
All resources, including text, video, graphs, and articles, furthers their foundational knowledge of AI.
Reflection
This project taught me so much about AI literacy, especially through the lens of Dartmouth's history (Did you know the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined at Dartmouth?)
On the design end, it forced me to think deeply about what motivates a student to learn, which is where brainstorming the character of Twigby came into play.