BUGgy: Supporting AI Safety Education through Gamified Learning
Sophie Sananikone, Xenia Demetriou, Mariam Ibrahim, Nienke Posthumus · Team AI Safety Initiative Groningen
Submitted to Women in AI Safety Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) development continues to proliferate, educating the wider public on AI Safety and the risks and limitations of AI increasingly gains importance. AI Safety Initiatives are being established across the world with the aim of facilitating discussion-based courses on AI Safety. However, these initiatives are located rather sparsely around the world, and not everyone has access to a group to join for the course. Online versions of such courses are selective and have limited spots, which may be an obstacle for some to join. Moreover, efforts to improve engagement and memory consolidation would be a notable addition to the course through Game-Based Learning (GBL), which has research supporting its potential in improving learning outcomes for users. Therefore, we propose a supplementary tool for BlueDot's AI Safety courses, that implements GBL to practice course content, as well as open-ended reflection questions. It was designed with principles from cognitive psychology and interface design, as well as theories for question formulation, addressing different levels of comprehension. To evaluate our prototype, we conducted user testing with cognitive walk-throughs and a questionnaire addressing different aspects of our design choices. Overall, results show that the tool is a promising way to supplement discussion-based courses in a creative and accessible way, and can be extended to other courses of similar structure. It shows potential for AI Safety courses to reach a wider audience with the effect of more informed and safe usage of AI, as well as inspiring further research into educational tools for AI Safety education.
Reviews
Amazing project! I really enjoyed going through your prototype.
Here are some things I particularly enjoyed:
- It is so cute! It gave me a very friendly vibe and I truly had a lovely time going through the journey.
- I loved that you used the loading screens as an opportunity to educate users about AI safety.
- Good job tying the readings to particular quizzes, this would be a good learning supplement given we don't have quizzes on the intro to TAI course.
- Good call on using Figma to make a prototype and focusing more time on the content and execution! This means that you've managed to create something way more substantial by the end.
Here are some things I thought could have been improved:
- I think there were lots of moments where you could have leveraged your user's attention to teach them AI safety concepts! Perhaps when a person got a question wrong, you could explain why their answer is wrong. Or given they were already invested in BUG and the story, you might have woven in AI safety concepts into the narrative and used the quiz as a way to evaluate learning objectives.
- Participants typically have lots of questions about the content that aren't answered within the readings and are usually part of the facilitator's responsibility to answer. I wonder if there is a way that your app could also address this challenge.
- The key challenge here is developing challenging questions from the resources which properly assess learner's understanding. I would have loved to see more details on how you address this!
I think this sort of app would be excellent for targeting a much younger audience who would find this learning journey more accessible!
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A neat demonstration of what could be a much larger game. Some references seem to have been misquoted (e.g. Shaffer, 2006 doesn't include commentary on "Knowing" and "doing", and some of the concepts quoted don't appear to have influenced the game design.) I suggest further care is taken as this project develops to ensure deep engagement with the existing literature to influence design choices.
Great to see the user testing, and examples of questions (and approximate difficulty) of the questions for the final app. Technical and reflective questions enable the user to engage with the content on a variety of levels. Aiming to have a discussion board and readings available in the app are good ideas to extend and contextualize the learning from the BlueDot Impact course. However, beware of additional capacity required to moderate or manage active discussions between app users. Further explanation of the BlueDot Impact course and how the relevant knowledge was selected would be great to see.
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I am interested in the IA
Cite this project
@misc{sananikone2025buggy,
title = {{BUGgy: Supporting AI Safety Education through Gamified Learning}},
author = {Sophie Sananikone and Xenia Demetriou and Mariam Ibrahim and Nienke Posthumus},
year = {2025},
month = mar,
note = {Submitted to Women in AI Safety Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/buggy-supporting-ai-safety-education-through-gamified-learning}},
url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/buggy-supporting-ai-safety-education-through-gamified-learning}
}More from Women in AI Safety Hackathon
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