How Playing with AI Can Build Human Agency

With guest Yusuf Ahmad

How can learning to use AI be more like, well, what happens at a skate park? This week on Future Fluent, Betsy Corcoran and Jeremy Roschelle explore how to build "human agency" with Yusuf Ahmad, the cofounder and CEO of Playlab.ai. At a skate park, individuals practice their own skills and learn from one another. That's just what's happening at Playlab.ai, a nonprofit where educators build AI tools to support their unique approach to teaching. By playing and iterating with AI, both individually and in community, educators change their relationship with technology and strengthen their sense of agency. AI is a different kind of technology than educators have experienced before, he argues. But the way to harness it begins with encouraging diverse people and communities to play.

Yusuf Ahmad

Yusuf Ahmad is the cofounder and chief executive of Playlab, a tech nonprofit that empowers educators, schools, and nonprofits to build their own AI tools or adapt tools built by others. Prior to founding Playlab, Yusuf led new product development for Teach For America, contributed to Scratch (a creative coding platform used by millions of kids), conducted research at the MIT Media Lab, and was on the founding team of ALU & ALX, a pan-African network of universities and alternative higher ed pathways. 

Outside of work, he mentors startups through MIT’s Sandbox Fund, angel invests in AI edtech companies including LitLab and Recess, and is a proud girl dad.

Want more? Take a look here! 

• Playlab.ai is a nonprofit organization building tools that help educators and students play with AI and build tools that work for them. 

• Tinkering Toward Utopia, by David Tyack and Larry Cuban – and the commentary, “Why School Reform Is Impossible,” by Seymour Papert 

• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by Tim Wu

• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks 

• Twenty Things to do with a Computer, by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, 1971. (PDF of original paper.)  

• 20 Things to do with a Computer Forward 50 (on the work of Seymour Papert & Cynthia Solomon) by Gary S. Stager, 2021.