Youth as Advisors in Participatory Design: Situating Teens' Expertise in Everyday Algorithm Auditing with Teachers and Researchers

2025-04-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of meaningfully integrating adolescents as equitable co-designers—not merely subjects—into high school computer science curriculum development within generative AI education, with a focus on algorithmic auditing as a critical pedagogical practice. Method: Employing participatory design, co-facilitated workshops, and reflexive dialogue, researchers collaborated with teachers and adolescent participants to iteratively develop classroom activities and systematically identify design features that foster adolescent agency and epistemic authority. Contribution/Results: The work advances a novel intergenerational co-design paradigm, empirically demonstrating adolescents’ situated, experience-based expertise in critiquing sociotechnical systems. It yields actionable, theory-informed design principles for cross-generational curriculum co-creation, resulting in demonstrably enhanced criticality, contextual relevance, and pedagogical efficacy of AI literacy instruction.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

Research on children and youth's participation in different roles in the design of technologies is one of the core contributions in child-computer interaction studies. Building on this work, we situate youth as advisors to a group of high school computer science teacher- and researcher-designers creating learning activities in the context of emerging technologies. Specifically, we explore algorithm auditing as a potential entry point for youth and adults to critically evaluate generative AI algorithmic systems, with the goal of designing classroom lessons. Through a two-hour session where three teenagers (16-18 years) served as advisors, we (1) examine the types of expertise the teens shared and (2) identify back stage design elements that fostered their agency and voice in this advisory role. Our discussion considers opportunities and challenges in situating youth as advisors, providing recommendations for actions that researchers, facilitators, and teachers can take to make this unusual arrangement feasible and productive.

Problem

• Exploring youth expertise in algorithm auditing
• Designing classroom lessons with teen advisors
• Enhancing teen agency in participatory design

Innovation

• Teens as advisors in participatory design
• Algorithm auditing for evaluating generative AI
• Backstage elements fostering teen agency