For this week’s assignment, I read a paper titled “Envisioning AI for K-12: What should every child know about AI?” The goal of this paper was to be a call to action and put forth an optimistic view of what AI education should look like in our near future. The motivating statement was shocking to me because I had never conceived of the future of AI in quite this way:
“For many in this generation, AI will be an often overlooked, magical force that powers their lives much as electricity, the internal combustion engine, and networking technology power ours.”
The authors first describe the state of AI education for kids and then outline five big ideas in AI and what students should be able to understand an do related to each one in the four grade bands (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12):
Computers perceive the world using sensors
Agents maintain models/representations of the world and use them for reasoning
Computers can learn from data
Making agents interact comfortably with humans is a substantial challenge for AI developers
AI applications can impact society in both positive and negative ways
I believe that the fifth big idea is the most important one because without it, their “blue sky” predictions about AI will not be realized. Bias is mentioned only once in the paper and I think that big questions such as this and also about ethicsn and human rights need to be front and center in this work. Language in these curricula will be very important as well in creating new standards and conventions and will even extend to how students conceive of themselves, other humans, and the natural world. I would encourage the creation of these curricula to be an interdisciplinary endeavor (including other disciplines such as sociology and philosophy) rather than having it developed solely by computer scientists. Overall, I find the work that the authors of the paper are doing encouraging!