Towards an AI-Infused Interdisciplinary Curriculum for Middle-Grade Classrooms

Abstract

As AI becomes more widely used across a variety of disciplines, it is increasingly important to teach AI concepts to K-12 students in order to prepare them for an AI-driven future workforce. Hence, educators and researchers have been working to develop curricula that make these concepts accessible to K-12 students. We are designing and developing a comprehensive AI curriculum delivered through a series of carefully crafted activities in an adapted \emph{Snap!} environment for middle-grade students. In this work, we lay out the proposed content of our curriculum and present the design, development, and implementation results of the first unit of our curriculum that focuses on teaching the breadth-first search algorithm. The activities in this unit have been revised after being piloted with a single high-school student. These activities were further refined after a group of K-12 teachers examined and critiqued them during a two-week professional development workshop. Our teachers created a lesson plan around the activities and implemented that lesson in a summer workshop with 14 middle school students. Our results demonstrated that our activities were successful in helping many of the students in understanding and implementing the algorithm through block-based programming while extra supplementary material was needed to assist some other students. In this paper, we explain our curriculum and technology, the results of implementing the first unit of our curriculum in a summer camp, and lessons learned for future developments.

ImageSTEAM: Teacher Professional Development for Integrating Visual Computing into Middle School Lessons

“…For computer science teachers, a technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework was introduced for professional training (Sun et al 2022). Akram et al utilized the Snap programming environment to teach about basic AI concepts in search algorithms which was introduced to teachers in two-week workshops (Akram et al 2022). Extending beyond STEM classes, Lin and Van Brummelen conducted teacher professional development workshops where teachers co-designed curriculum that were integrated into English and Social Studies classes at the middle school level (Lin and Van Brummelen 2021).…”

Does Any AI-Based Activity Contribute to Develop AI Conception? A Case Study with Italian Fifth and Sixth Grade Classes

“…Similarly, Song et al (2022) outlines a course for elementary schools, inspired to the five big ideas of AI4K12 (Touretzky et al 2019), where block-based programming represents the backbone of several teaching modules. Also the approach described in (Akram et al 2022) uses block-based programming for explaining AI techniques and algorithms, but such a proposal adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective and AI techniques are contextualized in concrete problems. For instance, the module on knowledge-based systems is done together with a module of physical sciences so that students will have the opportunity to build models (i.e., rules) of physical aspects of the world.…”

Effect of an Analogy-Based Approach of Artificial Intelligence Pedagogy in Upper Primary Schools

“…Furthermore, AI education extends beyond the technical aspects, emphasizing the ethical and social implications of AI technologies (Touretzky et al, 2019). By acknowledging AI as an independent subject, K-12 curricula can provide a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to AI education, incorporating elements from computer science, mathematics, statistics, ethics, and domain-specific knowledge (Akram et al, 2022).…”