This paper presents a proposal of specific curriculum in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for high school students, which has been organized as a two-year subject. The curriculum was designed based on two premises. The first one is that, although the proposal is targeted to scientific programmes, the involved students and teachers do not have any previous knowledge about AI. Accordingly, the teaching units have been designed with the aim of supporting teachers in a new discipline for them and, in addition, providing an introductory level to students. The main didactical objective is to establish the fundamentals of AI from a practical perspective, learning technical concepts by using them to solve specific problems. The approach that has been followed in the teaching units is focused on developing embedded intelligence solutions, that is, programming real-world devices which interact with real environments. To this end, and to address a second fundamental premise of low investment capability at schools, it has been decided to use Smartphones as the central technological element to implement such embedded intelligence at classes. This curriculum has been developed within the Erasmus + project entitled "AI + : Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School". The project was carried out by a team of AI experts and high school teachers who created the teaching units, and a group of students that tested them for three years, providing feedback to make the curriculum feasible for its introduction in schools in the short-term. The main results obtained from its implementation within the project scope are presented and discussed here, with the aim of contributing to the AIEd community progress by means of a practical pilot experience. Although the curriculum has been designed and tested at European level, it has been created with a general perspective of AI education, so it can be applied worldwide.
13 February 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
This paper presents the Robobo SmartCity model, an educational resource to introduce students in Computational Intelligence (CI) topics using educational robotics as the core learning technology. Robobo SmartCity allows educators to train learners in Artificial Intelligence (AI) fundamentals from a feasible and practical perspective, following the recommendations of digital education plans to introduce AI at all educational levels. This resource is based on the Robobo educational robot and an autonomous driving setup. It is made up of a city mockup, simulation models, and programming libraries adapted to the students' skill level. In it, students can be trained in CI topics that support robot autonomy, as computer vision, machine learning, or human-robot interaction, while developing solutions in the motivating and challenging scope of autonomous driving. The main details of this open resource are provided with a set of possible challenges to be faced in it. They are organized in terms of the educational level and students' skills. The resource has been mainly tested with secondary and high school students, obtaining successful learning outcomes, presented here to inspire other teachers in taking advantage of this learning technology in their classes.
The present paper is part of the European Erasmus+ project on educational innovation led by the UDC and entitled “AI+: Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School”. In this paper, the progress achieved during the first year of the project will be presented. Mainly, the definition of the methodological approach for this future subject has been defined, and the AI topics to be dealt with at this age have been established. It has been a great effort to select the most appropriate focus for this subject considering the students’ and teachers’ technical background and the schools’ equipment.