Date
Publisher
arXiv
This paper, submitted to the special track on resources for teaching AI in
K-12, presents an eXplainable AI (XAI)-based classroom game "Breakable Machine"
for teaching critical, transformative AI literacy through adversarial play and
interrogation of AI systems. Designed for learners aged 10-15, the game invites
students to spoof an image classifier by manipulating their appearance or
environment in order to trigger high-confidence misclassifications. Rather than
focusing on building AI models, this activity centers on breaking them-exposing
their brittleness, bias, and vulnerability through hands-on, embodied
experimentation. The game includes an XAI view to help students visualize
feature saliency, revealing how models attend to specific visual cues. A shared
classroom leaderboard fosters collaborative inquiry and comparison of
strategies, turning the classroom into a site for collective sensemaking. This
approach reframes AI education by treating model failure and misclassification
not as problems to be debugged, but as pedagogically rich opportunities to
interrogate AI as a sociotechnical system. In doing so, the game supports
students in developing data agency, ethical awareness, and a critical stance
toward AI systems increasingly embedded in everyday life. The game and its
source code are freely available.
What is the application?
Why use AI?
Study design
