Collaborative Content Creation among All Students in a Class through a Literature Review Activity (and an Informal Introduction to Machine Learning)

A research literature review activity leading to the creation of a word cloud is described. The word cloud is an emergent result from submissions from all students in the class, and it is used as further learning material. The collaborative nature of this exercise, and in particular considering that all the students in the class participate adds a sense of ownership and belonging to the class and also expectation and enthusiasm to discover the emergent result. The process to obtain the emergent result is at the same time an example illustrating later topics in the course. Further, the activity includes reflection discussions providing further opportunities to learn from both, the process and the result itself. While the activity was developed for an Artificial Intelligence course, it can be used in other courses where research and exploration is encouraged, as well as in classes or varied sizes.