Artificial intelligence’s (AI) potential is real, and children should start learning about it early. Many took their first steps in the field using Siri, Alexa, and other personal assistants incorporating elements of AI.
The application of AI will cross disciplines, including business, education, journalism, law enforcement, and medicine. Whether students eventually work in those fields, or they become involved directly in designing AI solutions, they should become AI-literate at an early age. Expanding STEM education programs to include AI and finding ways to fuel young people’s interest in it is crucial, considering its expected effects on the workforce, global competition, and other socio-economic factors.
Shirley Malcom, head of education and human resources programs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said last year in a CXOTalk on AI’s impact on jobs training: “I worry about the preparation of the next generation to be able to move into the jobs of the future. I worry…whether we’re giving them the education that they need.”
China’s government has mandated that all K-12 students be taught about AI, and now the U.S. needs to do the same, Prof. David Touretzky, an AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), notes in an email. “A lot of AI concepts, such as knowledge representation or heuristic search, are accessible even to young students, if presented in the right way.”
To help bolster AI education, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) in 2018 set up AI for K-12, a joint working group to develop national guidelines for teaching kindergarten through 12th grade students about AI. “We were inspired by the CSTA computing standards, which serve as national guidelines for what kids in K-12 should know about computing in general. Even though AI is part of computer science, the 2017 CSTA computing standards contain just two sentences about AI. So, we saw a need to educate the K-12 community about AI and provide guidance on what they should be teaching to kids,” Touretzky, who leads the working group, says.
Touretzky pointed to five main ideas the working group has mapped out to guide curriculum designers:
- Computers perceive the world using sensors
- Agents construct models/representations or the world and use them for reasoning
- Computers can learn from data
- Making agents interact naturally with humans is a challenge for AI developers
- AI can affect society in positive and negative ways
“There will be many different AI curricula developed in the coming years, targeting different age groups or favoring different pedagogical approaches, e.g., some might focus on activity-based learning, while others might rely more on readings and videos. But our hope is that all of these curricula will align with the guidelines so they don’t leave out important topics, or frame things in a way that experts think is misleading,” notes Touretzky. “For example, some people mistakenly think that AI and machine learning are the same thing. They’re not. Machine learning is just one topic within AI. Similarly, AI and robotics are not the same thing. AI is just one component of robotics.”
