Where Does AI Leave a Footprint? Children's Reasoning About AI's Environmental Costs
Aayushi Dangol, Robert Wolfe, Nisha Devasia, Mitsuka Kiyohara, Jason Yip, Julie A. Kientz

TL;DR
This paper presents Ecoprompt, an interactive system designed to help children understand and reason about the environmental costs of AI through a simulation game and footprint calculator.
Contribution
It introduces Ecoprompt, a novel educational tool that combines systems thinking with interactive gameplay to teach children about AI's environmental impact.
Findings
Children expressed awareness of societal and environmental tradeoffs of AI.
The system revealed children's sense of agency and responsibility regarding AI's environmental costs.
Ecoprompt broadens AI literacy to include systems-level environmental reasoning.
Abstract
Two of the most socially consequential issues facing today's children are the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid changes to the earth's climate. Both issues are complex and contested, and they are linked through the notable environmental costs of AI use. Using a systems thinking framework, we developed an interactive system called Ecoprompt to help children reason about the environmental impact of AI. EcoPrompt combines a prompt-level environmental footprint calculator with a simulation game that challenges players to reason about the impact of AI use on natural resources that the player manages. We evaluated the system through two participatory design sessions with 16 children ages 6-12. Our findings surfaced children's perspectives on societal and environmental tradeoffs of AI use, as well as their sense of agency and responsibility. Taken together, these findings…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
