The AI4K12 Initiative (AI4K12.org) is developing a national community around K-12 AI Education. In January 2021, the AI4K12 Initiative convened leaders in K-12 computer science education from 27 states and 3 districts/territories at a virtual workshop to develop plans for introducing artificial intelligence into their curricula. The two-day workshop provided state delegations with opportunities for collaborative visioning, self-assessment, and goal setting through a state-level adaptation of the SCRIPT strategic planning tool developed by CSforALL, an organization committed to expanding K-12 CS education. The Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance, focused on broadening participation in computing at the state level, also contributed to the development of the workshop. The workshop sparked new initiatives in several states to start working on their AI education plans or strengthen their K-12 AI leadership team. Several states are already updating their computing education standards to include AI, creating new AI courses, and providing opportunities for teachers to become AI-fluent. But some have still not fully developed their computing education programs and are just beginning to think about AI. This video will briefly introduce the State of K-12 AI Education in Your State planning workshop, highlight several state efforts, and talk about opportunities for more states to get involved in the future.
Computer Science, Broadening Participation, Workforce Development
AI4K12, CSforALL, Carnegie Mellon Univ
EHR Core Research (ECR), Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST)
Related Content for Helping States Plan to Teach AI in K-12
Discussion from the 2021 STEM For All Video Showcase (23 posts)
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 11, 2021 | 05:37 a.m.
Welcome to Helping States Plan to Teach AI in K-12.
We are the AI4K12 Leadership Team in collaboration with Leigh Ann DeLyser at CSforAll. This past January we convened 27 US states and 3 territories to create K-12 AI visions and implementation plans for each state.
Each day of this STEM Video Showcase, we will discuss a different topic related to implementing K-12 AI Education in your state. We will be joined by state team leaders to discuss their progress toward implementing K-12 AI Education.
Take a look at our video to get an overview of the workshop and we look forward to answering questions about your K-12 AI Education Effort and connecting you to people in your state.
To learn more about the AI4K12 Initiative visit AI4K12.org!
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 11, 2021 | 10:36 a.m.
Thanks for stopping by. Introduce yourself and let us know what K-12 AI activities are you involved in or know about in your state?
Thank you for your presentation and the work your team has done to plan to teach AI. I currently teach technology literacy to students in grades 3-5. As you begin planning, I am curious to see how you might implement this new topic of study. Do you see it being taught separately in a class like a related arts (technology literacy, computer science, STEAM/STEM, etc) or do you see it embedded into the existing curriculum in areas like science and math? Who will be responsible for teaching AI? It all sounds so exciting, but I can see the challenge of trying to find experts to teach it. Thank you, again, for sharing.
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Suzanne Otto
David Touretzky
David Touretzky
Co-Presenter Research Professor
May 11, 2021 | 01:01 p.m.
Thank you for your question, Shad. This issue comes up frequently in discussions about adding AI to the curriculum. In the lower grades, which already have a packed curriculum and lack electives, we think teachers will want to incorporate AI topics into existing math, science, language arts, and social studies classes. Starting in middle school there is room for AI electives. In fact, we have a newly-funded NSF ITEST project to develop an AI elective for Georgia middle school students, and a teacher PD course to help teachers learn to deliver this elective. But we still think that basic AI concepts need to be incorporated into existing math, science, language arts, and social studies classes in middle and high school because not all students will opt to take an AI elective.
All students are interacting with AI technology in their daily lives, even if most don't recognize it as AI. Many children arrive in kindergarten today having already spent two years conversing with Alexa. Even before they are old enough to have smartphones of their own, they are using their parents' phones and tablets and playing with Snapchat filters, speech understanding and generation systems, product recommender systems, facial recognition, and more. Their parents' cars, even if not yet self-driving, have capabilities such as lane departure warnings, defensive braking, and self-parking that are AI-powered. Questions about how these systems work, and their societal implications, can be addressed as part of both science and social studies classes.
We agree that there is a huge need for teacher PD in this area. There is also tremendous government interest in AI right now. The Biden administration just announced the new AI.gov site last week. So we are hopeful that we will see a lot of progress in AI education in the coming years.
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Shad Wachter
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Facilitator Postdoctoral Researcher
May 11, 2021 | 11:44 a.m.
Thank you all for your leadership in helping states develop coherent visions and plans for teaching AI in K-12 and equipping the students with the critical knowledge for the 21st century.
Could you please share a bit more about the five models for K-12 AI Education you mentioned in the video? I’d also be interested in learning what the workshop participants identified as the most significant challenges for developing resource and teacher capacity for effective K-12 AI Education.
I look forward to learning more about your work.
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 12, 2021 | 04:05 p.m.
Hi Dalila,
Our work is organized around the 5 Big Ideas in AI. This poster provides a brief description of each big idea (1-Perception, 2-Representation & Reasoning, 3-Learning, 4-Natural Interaction, 5-Societal Impact. It has been translated into 14 different languages.
At the time of the workshop, there were 6 states actively working to advance K-12 AI Education statewide
Maryland - Teacher Professional Development (with outreach to other states)
Texas - Teacher Professional Development (with outreach to other states)
Georgia - Development of a Artificial Intelligence CTE pathway in high school, AI magnet schools
Florida - Development of a Artificial Intelligence CTE pathway in high school, AI magnet schools, K-Gray AI Education model
Wisconsin - (see post below from Laura Schmidt) - Early trailblazers in AI4K12
North Carolina - AI resources for teachers and outreach to rural communities
Hello, Christina! it was great to see your video and learn more about the AI State Planning workshop. This work is so important.
Introduction: I’m Dean of Access & Inclusion for Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL and PI of the GRRATE (Guitars, Rocketry, Robotics) Project. I am excited to see your work at the K-12 level.
I would love to learn more about how you are including equity, inclusion, and diversity into your AI project. As you think about PD that is needed to prepare teachers to teach AI concepts, how are you planning to help prepare to teachers to effectively increase the diversity of AI interested students?
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 12, 2021 | 04:50 p.m.
Hi Cheryl!
It is so go to hear from you and learn more about the progress you've made with the GRRATE (Guitars, Rocketry, Robotics) Project! I love your focus on equity of access to rural communities and ensuring that they are not overlooked when engaging learning opportunities are being developed and rolled out.
K-12 AI Education: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
We firmly believe that AI is not just a CS topic, it has societal impacts and is an economic driver and we want all students to be able to participate in and benefit from its advancement.
As such we believe we need to be thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion from three perspectives.
Equity of Access
Geographic
Socio-economic
Racial and Ethnic Groups
Differently-Abled learners
High and Low Resourced Schools & Communities
Formal & informal learning
Diversity & Inclusion of Voices and Representation
Ensure everyone has a seat at the table (e.g., student, teachers, community, administrators, parents, decision-makers)
Ensure everyone has the skills to develop AI-enabled technologies
Ensure everyone is empowered to evaluate and make decisions about the use of AI-enabled technologies for personal, educational, professional, and decision-making purposes.
Diverse, Equitable, & Inclusive Content and Pedagogy
Strength-based
Culturally-relevant and responsive
Low floors and high ceilings
Knowledge and Skill-building
CS as well as STEM, Literacy, and Humanities connections
Range of course and integration unit offerings
It is vital that we keep diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of every phase of K-12 AI Education implementation using these three perspectives to evaluate our progress. It is vital that we not only include teachers from high-resourced districts or highly motivated early adopters into this effort. We need everyone engaged if we are going to reach all students and increase the diversity of AI-interested students. We know that this will require explicitly reaching out to teachers and inviting them to participate and not just waiting for them to volunteer or be "voluntold." It will also mean meeting teachers where they are in their content areas and comfort with AI and integrating technology and AI topics into their teaching. This will also need to be reflected in the offering of AI courses, recruitment of diverse students to participate in these courses, education of counselors and administrators about these courses (NCWIT Counselors for Computing resources), and helping all students to see the relevance of AI to their everyday lives.
We hope to leverage the existing shifts in education toward inclusive and culturally relevant content and pedagogy as well as encourage their intentional and explicit inclusion in AI professional learning opportunities. These approaches are going to be vital for the exploration of societal impacts on individuals and communities. Students and teachers will need to be equipped to engage in deep conversations and consider alternative perspectives when designing and evaluating technologies.
What ways have you been able to prepare teachers to effectively increase the diversity of students who enroll in your GRRATE project?
Laura Schmidt
May 11, 2021 | 05:34 p.m.
I have been involved in the AI4K12 initiative from the beginning. It has been transformational and inspiring to watch the care that researchers, educators, advisors and advocates have taken to develop and disseminate information to those that believe in the democratization of AI education for a wide variety of reasons. The partnership with CSforALL to develop the workshop was critical as the revised SCRIPT process does work to lead state/regional/district teams through the WHY that will influence their plans for the future. In the Greater MKE region, we have a lot of amazing organizations working on the same. The MKE Tech Coalition (www.mketech.org) is proud to partner with our higher education partners, members and non-profit partners to launch the MKE Tech Talent Accelerator with a focus on the Ethics and Impact of Data and AI. While this program is designed for a multidisciplinary college audience, we understand the importance of the pipeline in K12 and are hosting an in-service for K12 and collegiate educators across the region interested in getting more engaged in our collective GM-STEM outreach efforts. #mketech www.mketechtalent.org (Wisconsin)
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Christina Gardner-McCune
David Touretzky
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 12, 2021 | 05:01 p.m.
Laura, thank you for trailblazing the way for K-12 AI Education in Milwaukee and Wisconsin and AI4K12.
Can you share more about the ways that you are using Ethics and Impact of Data and AI to develop tech talent?
Suzanne Otto
Facilitator Teacher / Fellow
May 12, 2021 | 08:05 a.m.
I enjoyed watching your video and learning about your efforts to educate and support leaders in developing a plan to integrate AI instruction within k-12 education. It appears that your initiative will leverage the best ideas across many states vs. expecting each state and school district to reinvent the wheel, yet, you've provided a small group structure that allows for the flexibility that each unique state needs.
I'm a teacher in a very rural community where having consistent broadband access became a limitation in our pandemic instruction abilities. Although there are many things that we do exceptionally well, I feel that our district may be on the trailing edge of adopting new technologies and that we have many more basic needs in educating our students before we are ready to attack cutting edge issues like AI, etc. Have you thought about strategies for including the smallest of our rural school districts given our unique needs? Can you give advice to support those of us who are "catching up"?
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 12, 2021 | 07:15 p.m.
Hi Suzzanne,
Checkout Leigh Ann's reply (below) to your comment about doing CS work in rural communities.
Supports for states looking to implement K-12 AI Education
We are leveraging the advancement of the K-12 CS Education movement to help states, districts, and schools used effective strategies for integrating AI education into their curriculum.This is especially important as each state has different procedural structures for implementing new curricular content while curricular and instructional resources can be shared more universally.
For instance,
Adoption of state standards
Development of Career and technical education (CTE or CTAE) pathways
Computer Science electives
Integration of Computational Thinking into STEM courses
Math, Science, or Foreign language requirement
Similar to the work of CSTA and the CS K-12 Framework, we are developing guidelines to for what students should know and be able to do with AI. Our aim is that these guidelines will help curriculum developers, professional learning developers, and teachers find ways to teach AI and provide alignment across various implementations and offerings.
The AI4K12 Guidelines are organized around the 5 Big Ideas in AI: 1-Perception, 2-Representation & Reasoning, 3-Learning, 4-Natural Interaction, 5-Societal Impact.
Currently Available Big Idea #1 and Big Idea #3 progression chart developed in collaboration with CS teachers across the country over the past 3 years.
Our goal is to develop community among the states so that they are able to
use each other as resources
collaborate on areas of common interest, and
leverage strategies each state has successfully employed to help others who are getting started in areas where others have developed expertise, models, and resources.
Minimizing redundant efforts.
The K-12 AI Education State effort is new, we are all working to get started and no one state is operating on all 5 areas we focused on in our AI Rubrics. There are no expectations for speed of pace, just intentional investment in expanding access to K-12 AI education in your state in ways that are meaningful and appropriate for your state and districts.
It is not too late to get engaged. We have all really just begun this journey and there is room for everyone.
If a team exists for your state, contact your state team and see how you can get involved
Form a state team
a delegation of 4-6 CS Education leaders from your state who can serve as an initial leadership team to help get the ball rolling. You can bring more people in along the way
looking for a mixture of attendees including
A state-level education official who will have responsibility for overseeing changes to the curriculum standards to incorporate AI, and teacher PD to support those changes
A university person who is involved in K-12 computing education in your state
A superintendent, principal, or teacher with an interest in K-12 AI education
work through the rubrics to evaluate where you are
develop your AI implementation plan for each rubric area
Join our State Webinars to join the community and share your progress - our next webinar is July 22 3-5 p.m. ET - 6 month milestone (We send details out to the mailing list)
If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at info@ai4k12.org
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Pati Ruiz
David Touretzky
Co-Presenter Research Professor
May 12, 2021 | 10:19 p.m.
Even rural students have smartphones, and there is a lot of AI built into those phones, including speech recognition, face recognition, intelligent agents like Siri or Google Assistant, and a ton of AI-powered tools such as Snapchat filters, recommender systems (deciding what ads to show you or what to put in your Facebook feed), Google Lens and Google Translate. So AI is not some exotic subject unrelated to students' lives; it's part of their everyday experience. Once they understand this, they will want to know more about how AI works.
We are interested in developing AI education resources that are widely accessible. Unplugged activities can be done anywhere and cost nothing. We're also fostering the development of demos that can run in the browser, even on a cheap Chromebook, so anyone can access them for free. Check out the resource directory at https://AI4K12.org for links to good stuff.
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Leigh DeLyser
Co-Presenter Executive Director
May 12, 2021 | 08:57 a.m.
Suzanne - thanks for commenting!
At CSforALL we've worked with a large number of rural communities and found that shared resources or slow builds of classroom libraries of materials that don't require fast internet connections are a great way to ensure students get content without relying on infrastructure that does not exist. We've seen lending libraries of robots or materials that travel between communities in a bus or van (so schools can pool resources), or even the use of centers in a classroom to balance 1-2 robot kits with board games or unplugged activities while students work. There's a great video about the centers approach at https://blueprint.cs4all.nyc/resources/7/
Thanks for being engaged and keep up the great work for your students!
Hi Christina, It's great to hear that this work is happening -- and at such a large scale. Challenger Center is currently engaged in an NSF-sponsored research study, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and RAND Group -- to better understand how susceptible students and adults are to STEM-themed deepfake videos. We are using AI to create deepfakes and presenting them to K-12 students, university students, and adults to determine if they can identify real vs. fake videos and what factors might mitigate the risk that they consume fake stem content. Our study is not complete, but when it is, it might be of interest to your audience. Further, Challenger Center is an organization that makes technology-driven, deeply engaging STEM programs for K-12 students. We are very interested in creating a program to help support AI education.
Christina Gardner-McCune
Lead Presenter Associate Professor
May 12, 2021 | 07:42 p.m.
Hi Valerie,
Thanks for stopping by. Your research is very valuable as deep fake videos pose a serious risk to public confidence what is truth and reality. I would love to chat more about your work and see if there are avenues for collaboration. There are many curriculum developer, researchers, and professional learning developers that would be interested in the results of your work.
As Christina mentioned in her introductory posting, the AI4K12 Initiative is developing national guidelines for teaching AI in K-12, modeled after the CSTA Computing Standards. This initiative is jointly sponsored by CSTA, the Computer Science Teachers Association, and AAAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, with funding provided by NSF.
The process began in 2018. We formed an AI4K12 Working Group that brought experienced K-12 teachers together with AI experts and CS education researchers. The teachers in the working group were organized in four grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Over the course of the project we have had on average 4 teachers in each grade band. All of them had multiple years of experience teaching students in that age range.
The first thing the AI4K12 Working Group released was the list of Five Big Ideas in AI that serves as the organizing framework for the guidelines. But the guidelines themselves are much more detailed and took much longer to develop. In fact, we're still not done.
Between 2018 and 2020 we worked with the grade band groups and AI experts to develop concept lists for each big idea, and then work out how each concept should be treated in each grade band. The individual grade bands met weekly, and the entire working group met monthly. Each grade band produced a slide deck and then a more detailed spreadsheet with their treatment of each big idea.
The next stage of the work was to try to integrate the spreadsheets from each grade band into a coherent whole. This was partially successful, but in many places the alignment was incomplete. In the process of doing this work we had new insights into how the material should be covered. This led the Steering Committee to set out to generate a new synthesis of each big idea using the previous materal as a starting point. This new synthesis was then critiqued by grade band members and further refined.
The result is a grade band progression chart for each big idea. The rows of the chart are the concepts and subconcepts that make up that idea, and the columns are the four grade bands. Each cell of the chart contains a Learning Objective (what students in that grade band should be able to do with the concept) and an Enduring Understanding (what students in that grade band should know about the concept).
To date we've released draft grade band progression charts for Big Idea 1 (Perception) and Big Idea 3 (Learning). The progression chart for Big Idea 2 (Representation and Reasoning) will be released later this month. The progression charts for Big Idea 4 (Natural Interaction) and Big Idea 5 (Societal Impact) will be out by the fall.
The guidelines define what we believe every student should know about AI. We welcome feedback on the draft progression charts. They can be viewed at our web site, AI4K12.org. Our hope is that people who develop AI curriculum for K-12 will choose to align their work with these guidelines.
Bryan Cox
Co-Presenter Computer Science Specialist
May 13, 2021 | 02:41 p.m.
As one state example, the K-12 AI education work in Georgia began at the classroom level and has caught the attention of district-level and state-level advocates. At the classroom level, teachers are moved by the novelty of AI but also the widespread impacts on students' lives. Teachers presented at statewide computer science workshops, sharing their "why" and "how-to" with colleagues. One district, participating in national workshops and symposiums, began viewing AI as a fundamental as well as a developing workforce need. They began to develop a framework for a cluster of schools (elementary, middle, and high school feeder programs) that was rooted in AI learning and integrating AI across all content areas. Around the same time, the state CS Advisory Committee developed an AI task force to look at a more comprehensive approach that would incorporate the experiences of all parties. The task force included the teacher advocates, district leaders, industry partners, and higher education representatives.
The first outcome of the task force was to support the school district in developing an AI high school pathway. That pathway was approved by the GA State Board of Education this morning. The standards were created with industry partners, K-12 partners, and higher education partners. The standards had been out for public review for 30 days prior to being adopted by the state board. The three courses for the pathway are:
Foundations of Artificial Intelligence
AI Concepts
AI Applications
The second phase will be to continue to meet to determine how to incorporate AI into middle and elementary school. Considerations include "how to connect or integrate AI standards into the existing CS standards?", "what does AI instruction look like in elementary and middle school? ", and "is the goal exposure or discrete skills?.
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Pati Ruiz
Pati Ruiz
Facilitator Learning Sciences Researcher
May 14, 2021 | 10:34 a.m.
Thank you for all of the helpful links and resources shared along with this video in these comments and through your project website! I used to teach middle school students and AI is a topic we began to cover in my digital literacy classes. How are teachers brining in discussions of ethical issues in AI into their classrooms? I am curious to know if you plan on adding ethical AI to the big ideas or if there is content that you share with teachers that you like. Thank you again for all of your work in this area!
David Touretzky
Co-Presenter Research Professor
May 14, 2021 | 11:58 a.m.
Great question, Pati! Ethics are covered in our guidelines as part of Big Idea 5: Societal Impact. The ethical design of computing systems is a broader topic than just the ethics of AI. Any system that makes decisions about people, whether or not it uses AI, raises issues of fairness, disparate impact, transparency, and accountability.
The Big Ideas are not intended to be curriculum modules. They permeate the entire curriculum. So, for example, a module on self-driving cars could talk about how they perceive other cars and pedestrians (Big Idea 1: Perception), how they reason about their route (Big Idea 2: Representation and Reasoning), how their performance can improve with experience (Big Idea 3: Learning), how they should interact with human drivers (Big Idea 4: Natural Interaction), and the ethics of releasing still-imperfect technology to the public as Tesla has been doing (Big Idea 5: Societal Impact).
Blakely Payne at MIT has developed an AI ethics curriculum for middle school students. We link to it from our AI4K12.org resource directory.
Exciting to see such a vigorous and thoughtful initiative to prepare educators immersed in deep reflection to bring AI and data science into school. Very informative. Thank you.
Terrific initiative and activity! In New Jersey, CS Professional Learning hubs have just been designated for K-12 teacher and administrator resources. We are hoping to add AI into our outreach to the K-12 teachers. How would you suggest we proceed?
Bryan Cox
Co-Presenter Computer Science Specialist
May 18, 2021 | 12:04 p.m.
Hi Patricia. Like many of us, teachers have a very busy schedule, and giving them multiple options for engaging in learning provides them with the flexibility they need to engage at their convenience. Resources that allow them to learn in small increments are very helpful as well as synchronous and asynchronous experiences. In Georgia, we're working on some asynchronous professional learning modules that touch on everything from fundamental understandings about AI to the societal implications of AI innovation. We are also offering sessions regarding AI instruction at our professional learning summit this summer (https://constellationspd.cc.gatech.edu/). We are creating an AI subgroup in our computer science professional learning community so teachers can engage with each other about how they are incorporating AI into their instruction. This way teachers can ease in at whichever "depth" they feel comfortable and at varying levels of engagement.
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Welcome to Helping States Plan to Teach AI in K-12.
We are the AI4K12 Leadership Team in collaboration with Leigh Ann DeLyser at CSforAll. This past January we convened 27 US states and 3 territories to create K-12 AI visions and implementation plans for each state.
Each day of this STEM Video Showcase, we will discuss a different topic related to implementing K-12 AI Education in your state. We will be joined by state team leaders to discuss their progress toward implementing K-12 AI Education.
Our topics include
Take a look at our video to get an overview of the workshop and we look forward to answering questions about your K-12 AI Education Effort and connecting you to people in your state.
To learn more about the AI4K12 Initiative visit AI4K12.org!
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Thanks for stopping by. Introduce yourself and let us know what K-12 AI activities are you involved in or know about in your state?
Shad Wachter
Thank you for your presentation and the work your team has done to plan to teach AI. I currently teach technology literacy to students in grades 3-5. As you begin planning, I am curious to see how you might implement this new topic of study. Do you see it being taught separately in a class like a related arts (technology literacy, computer science, STEAM/STEM, etc) or do you see it embedded into the existing curriculum in areas like science and math? Who will be responsible for teaching AI? It all sounds so exciting, but I can see the challenge of trying to find experts to teach it. Thank you, again, for sharing.
Suzanne Otto
David Touretzky
David Touretzky
Research Professor
Thank you for your question, Shad. This issue comes up frequently in discussions about adding AI to the curriculum. In the lower grades, which already have a packed curriculum and lack electives, we think teachers will want to incorporate AI topics into existing math, science, language arts, and social studies classes. Starting in middle school there is room for AI electives. In fact, we have a newly-funded NSF ITEST project to develop an AI elective for Georgia middle school students, and a teacher PD course to help teachers learn to deliver this elective. But we still think that basic AI concepts need to be incorporated into existing math, science, language arts, and social studies classes in middle and high school because not all students will opt to take an AI elective.
All students are interacting with AI technology in their daily lives, even if most don't recognize it as AI. Many children arrive in kindergarten today having already spent two years conversing with Alexa. Even before they are old enough to have smartphones of their own, they are using their parents' phones and tablets and playing with Snapchat filters, speech understanding and generation systems, product recommender systems, facial recognition, and more. Their parents' cars, even if not yet self-driving, have capabilities such as lane departure warnings, defensive braking, and self-parking that are AI-powered. Questions about how these systems work, and their societal implications, can be addressed as part of both science and social studies classes.
We agree that there is a huge need for teacher PD in this area. There is also tremendous government interest in AI right now. The Biden administration just announced the new AI.gov site last week. So we are hopeful that we will see a lot of progress in AI education in the coming years.
Pati Ruiz
Shad Wachter
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Postdoctoral Researcher
Thank you all for your leadership in helping states develop coherent visions and plans for teaching AI in K-12 and equipping the students with the critical knowledge for the 21st century.
Could you please share a bit more about the five models for K-12 AI Education you mentioned in the video? I’d also be interested in learning what the workshop participants identified as the most significant challenges for developing resource and teacher capacity for effective K-12 AI Education.
I look forward to learning more about your work.
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Hi Dalila,
Our work is organized around the 5 Big Ideas in AI. This poster provides a brief description of each big idea (1-Perception, 2-Representation & Reasoning, 3-Learning, 4-Natural Interaction, 5-Societal Impact. It has been translated into 14 different languages.
At the time of the workshop, there were 6 states actively working to advance K-12 AI Education statewide
I've linked to their presentation slides and here is a link to the video of their presentations.
Check back for some of the updates from the state later in the showcase to learn more about the challenges.
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Cheryl Calhoun
Hello, Christina! it was great to see your video and learn more about the AI State Planning workshop. This work is so important.
Introduction: I’m Dean of Access & Inclusion for Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL and PI of the GRRATE (Guitars, Rocketry, Robotics) Project. I am excited to see your work at the K-12 level.
I would love to learn more about how you are including equity, inclusion, and diversity into your AI project. As you think about PD that is needed to prepare teachers to teach AI concepts, how are you planning to help prepare to teachers to effectively increase the diversity of AI interested students?
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Hi Cheryl!
It is so go to hear from you and learn more about the progress you've made with the GRRATE (Guitars, Rocketry, Robotics) Project! I love your focus on equity of access to rural communities and ensuring that they are not overlooked when engaging learning opportunities are being developed and rolled out.
K-12 AI Education: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
We firmly believe that AI is not just a CS topic, it has societal impacts and is an economic driver and we want all students to be able to participate in and benefit from its advancement.
As such we believe we need to be thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion from three perspectives.
Equity of Access
Diversity & Inclusion of Voices and Representation
Diverse, Equitable, & Inclusive Content and Pedagogy
It is vital that we keep diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of every phase of K-12 AI Education implementation using these three perspectives to evaluate our progress. It is vital that we not only include teachers from high-resourced districts or highly motivated early adopters into this effort. We need everyone engaged if we are going to reach all students and increase the diversity of AI-interested students. We know that this will require explicitly reaching out to teachers and inviting them to participate and not just waiting for them to volunteer or be "voluntold." It will also mean meeting teachers where they are in their content areas and comfort with AI and integrating technology and AI topics into their teaching. This will also need to be reflected in the offering of AI courses, recruitment of diverse students to participate in these courses, education of counselors and administrators about these courses (NCWIT Counselors for Computing resources), and helping all students to see the relevance of AI to their everyday lives.
We hope to leverage the existing shifts in education toward inclusive and culturally relevant content and pedagogy as well as encourage their intentional and explicit inclusion in AI professional learning opportunities. These approaches are going to be vital for the exploration of societal impacts on individuals and communities. Students and teachers will need to be equipped to engage in deep conversations and consider alternative perspectives when designing and evaluating technologies.
What ways have you been able to prepare teachers to effectively increase the diversity of students who enroll in your GRRATE project?
Laura Schmidt
I have been involved in the AI4K12 initiative from the beginning. It has been transformational and inspiring to watch the care that researchers, educators, advisors and advocates have taken to develop and disseminate information to those that believe in the democratization of AI education for a wide variety of reasons. The partnership with CSforALL to develop the workshop was critical as the revised SCRIPT process does work to lead state/regional/district teams through the WHY that will influence their plans for the future. In the Greater MKE region, we have a lot of amazing organizations working on the same. The MKE Tech Coalition (www.mketech.org) is proud to partner with our higher education partners, members and non-profit partners to launch the MKE Tech Talent Accelerator with a focus on the Ethics and Impact of Data and AI. While this program is designed for a multidisciplinary college audience, we understand the importance of the pipeline in K12 and are hosting an in-service for K12 and collegiate educators across the region interested in getting more engaged in our collective GM-STEM outreach efforts. #mketech www.mketechtalent.org (Wisconsin)
Christina Gardner-McCune
David Touretzky
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Laura, thank you for trailblazing the way for K-12 AI Education in Milwaukee and Wisconsin and AI4K12.
Can you share more about the ways that you are using Ethics and Impact of Data and AI to develop tech talent?
Suzanne Otto
Teacher / Fellow
I enjoyed watching your video and learning about your efforts to educate and support leaders in developing a plan to integrate AI instruction within k-12 education. It appears that your initiative will leverage the best ideas across many states vs. expecting each state and school district to reinvent the wheel, yet, you've provided a small group structure that allows for the flexibility that each unique state needs.
I'm a teacher in a very rural community where having consistent broadband access became a limitation in our pandemic instruction abilities. Although there are many things that we do exceptionally well, I feel that our district may be on the trailing edge of adopting new technologies and that we have many more basic needs in educating our students before we are ready to attack cutting edge issues like AI, etc. Have you thought about strategies for including the smallest of our rural school districts given our unique needs? Can you give advice to support those of us who are "catching up"?
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Hi Suzzanne,
Checkout Leigh Ann's reply (below) to your comment about doing CS work in rural communities.
Supports for states looking to implement K-12 AI Education
We are leveraging the advancement of the K-12 CS Education movement to help states, districts, and schools used effective strategies for integrating AI education into their curriculum. This is especially important as each state has different procedural structures for implementing new curricular content while curricular and instructional resources can be shared more universally.
For instance,
Similar to the work of CSTA and the CS K-12 Framework, we are developing guidelines to for what students should know and be able to do with AI. Our aim is that these guidelines will help curriculum developers, professional learning developers, and teachers find ways to teach AI and provide alignment across various implementations and offerings.
Our goal is to develop community among the states so that they are able to
The K-12 AI Education State effort is new, we are all working to get started and no one state is operating on all 5 areas we focused on in our AI Rubrics. There are no expectations for speed of pace, just intentional investment in expanding access to K-12 AI education in your state in ways that are meaningful and appropriate for your state and districts.
It is not too late to get engaged. We have all really just begun this journey and there is room for everyone.
Getting Started (Formatted PDF)
Interested in learning more about the AI4K12 initiative.
If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at info@ai4k12.org
Pati Ruiz
David Touretzky
Research Professor
Even rural students have smartphones, and there is a lot of AI built into those phones, including speech recognition, face recognition, intelligent agents like Siri or Google Assistant, and a ton of AI-powered tools such as Snapchat filters, recommender systems (deciding what ads to show you or what to put in your Facebook feed), Google Lens and Google Translate. So AI is not some exotic subject unrelated to students' lives; it's part of their everyday experience. Once they understand this, they will want to know more about how AI works.
We are interested in developing AI education resources that are widely accessible. Unplugged activities can be done anywhere and cost nothing. We're also fostering the development of demos that can run in the browser, even on a cheap Chromebook, so anyone can access them for free. Check out the resource directory at https://AI4K12.org for links to good stuff.
Pati Ruiz
Leigh DeLyser
Executive Director
Suzanne - thanks for commenting!
At CSforALL we've worked with a large number of rural communities and found that shared resources or slow builds of classroom libraries of materials that don't require fast internet connections are a great way to ensure students get content without relying on infrastructure that does not exist. We've seen lending libraries of robots or materials that travel between communities in a bus or van (so schools can pool resources), or even the use of centers in a classroom to balance 1-2 robot kits with board games or unplugged activities while students work. There's a great video about the centers approach at https://blueprint.cs4all.nyc/resources/7/
Thanks for being engaged and keep up the great work for your students!
Valerie Fitton-Kane
Hi Christina, It's great to hear that this work is happening -- and at such a large scale. Challenger Center is currently engaged in an NSF-sponsored research study, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and RAND Group -- to better understand how susceptible students and adults are to STEM-themed deepfake videos. We are using AI to create deepfakes and presenting them to K-12 students, university students, and adults to determine if they can identify real vs. fake videos and what factors might mitigate the risk that they consume fake stem content. Our study is not complete, but when it is, it might be of interest to your audience. Further, Challenger Center is an organization that makes technology-driven, deeply engaging STEM programs for K-12 students. We are very interested in creating a program to help support AI education.
Christina Gardner-McCune
Associate Professor
Hi Valerie,
Thanks for stopping by. Your research is very valuable as deep fake videos pose a serious risk to public confidence what is truth and reality. I would love to chat more about your work and see if there are avenues for collaboration. There are many curriculum developer, researchers, and professional learning developers that would be interested in the results of your work.
Please keep us posted - info@ai4k12.org and join the mailing list and share your work as it become available - AI4K12 mailing list
David Touretzky
Research Professor
As Christina mentioned in her introductory posting, the AI4K12 Initiative is developing national guidelines for teaching AI in K-12, modeled after the CSTA Computing Standards. This initiative is jointly sponsored by CSTA, the Computer Science Teachers Association, and AAAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, with funding provided by NSF.
The process began in 2018. We formed an AI4K12 Working Group that brought experienced K-12 teachers together with AI experts and CS education researchers. The teachers in the working group were organized in four grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Over the course of the project we have had on average 4 teachers in each grade band. All of them had multiple years of experience teaching students in that age range.
The first thing the AI4K12 Working Group released was the list of Five Big Ideas in AI that serves as the organizing framework for the guidelines. But the guidelines themselves are much more detailed and took much longer to develop. In fact, we're still not done.
Between 2018 and 2020 we worked with the grade band groups and AI experts to develop concept lists for each big idea, and then work out how each concept should be treated in each grade band. The individual grade bands met weekly, and the entire working group met monthly. Each grade band produced a slide deck and then a more detailed spreadsheet with their treatment of each big idea.
The next stage of the work was to try to integrate the spreadsheets from each grade band into a coherent whole. This was partially successful, but in many places the alignment was incomplete. In the process of doing this work we had new insights into how the material should be covered. This led the Steering Committee to set out to generate a new synthesis of each big idea using the previous materal as a starting point. This new synthesis was then critiqued by grade band members and further refined.
The result is a grade band progression chart for each big idea. The rows of the chart are the concepts and subconcepts that make up that idea, and the columns are the four grade bands. Each cell of the chart contains a Learning Objective (what students in that grade band should be able to do with the concept) and an Enduring Understanding (what students in that grade band should know about the concept).
To date we've released draft grade band progression charts for Big Idea 1 (Perception) and Big Idea 3 (Learning). The progression chart for Big Idea 2 (Representation and Reasoning) will be released later this month. The progression charts for Big Idea 4 (Natural Interaction) and Big Idea 5 (Societal Impact) will be out by the fall.
The guidelines define what we believe every student should know about AI. We welcome feedback on the draft progression charts. They can be viewed at our web site, AI4K12.org. Our hope is that people who develop AI curriculum for K-12 will choose to align their work with these guidelines.
Bryan Cox
Computer Science Specialist
As one state example, the K-12 AI education work in Georgia began at the classroom level and has caught the attention of district-level and state-level advocates. At the classroom level, teachers are moved by the novelty of AI but also the widespread impacts on students' lives. Teachers presented at statewide computer science workshops, sharing their "why" and "how-to" with colleagues. One district, participating in national workshops and symposiums, began viewing AI as a fundamental as well as a developing workforce need. They began to develop a framework for a cluster of schools (elementary, middle, and high school feeder programs) that was rooted in AI learning and integrating AI across all content areas. Around the same time, the state CS Advisory Committee developed an AI task force to look at a more comprehensive approach that would incorporate the experiences of all parties. The task force included the teacher advocates, district leaders, industry partners, and higher education representatives.
The first outcome of the task force was to support the school district in developing an AI high school pathway. That pathway was approved by the GA State Board of Education this morning. The standards were created with industry partners, K-12 partners, and higher education partners. The standards had been out for public review for 30 days prior to being adopted by the state board. The three courses for the pathway are:
The second phase will be to continue to meet to determine how to incorporate AI into middle and elementary school. Considerations include "how to connect or integrate AI standards into the existing CS standards?", "what does AI instruction look like in elementary and middle school? ", and "is the goal exposure or discrete skills?.
Pati Ruiz
Pati Ruiz
Learning Sciences Researcher
Thank you for all of the helpful links and resources shared along with this video in these comments and through your project website! I used to teach middle school students and AI is a topic we began to cover in my digital literacy classes. How are teachers brining in discussions of ethical issues in AI into their classrooms? I am curious to know if you plan on adding ethical AI to the big ideas or if there is content that you share with teachers that you like. Thank you again for all of your work in this area!
David Touretzky
Research Professor
Great question, Pati! Ethics are covered in our guidelines as part of Big Idea 5: Societal Impact. The ethical design of computing systems is a broader topic than just the ethics of AI. Any system that makes decisions about people, whether or not it uses AI, raises issues of fairness, disparate impact, transparency, and accountability.
The Big Ideas are not intended to be curriculum modules. They permeate the entire curriculum. So, for example, a module on self-driving cars could talk about how they perceive other cars and pedestrians (Big Idea 1: Perception), how they reason about their route (Big Idea 2: Representation and Reasoning), how their performance can improve with experience (Big Idea 3: Learning), how they should interact with human drivers (Big Idea 4: Natural Interaction), and the ethics of releasing still-imperfect technology to the public as Tesla has been doing (Big Idea 5: Societal Impact).
Blakely Payne at MIT has developed an AI ethics curriculum for middle school students. We link to it from our AI4K12.org resource directory.
Eric Hamilton
Exciting to see such a vigorous and thoughtful initiative to prepare educators immersed in deep reflection to bring AI and data science into school. Very informative. Thank you.
Patricia Morreale
Terrific initiative and activity! In New Jersey, CS Professional Learning hubs have just been designated for K-12 teacher and administrator resources. We are hoping to add AI into our outreach to the K-12 teachers. How would you suggest we proceed?
Bryan Cox
Computer Science Specialist
Hi Patricia. Like many of us, teachers have a very busy schedule, and giving them multiple options for engaging in learning provides them with the flexibility they need to engage at their convenience. Resources that allow them to learn in small increments are very helpful as well as synchronous and asynchronous experiences. In Georgia, we're working on some asynchronous professional learning modules that touch on everything from fundamental understandings about AI to the societal implications of AI innovation. We are also offering sessions regarding AI instruction at our professional learning summit this summer (https://constellationspd.cc.gatech.edu/). We are creating an AI subgroup in our computer science professional learning community so teachers can engage with each other about how they are incorporating AI into their instruction. This way teachers can ease in at whichever "depth" they feel comfortable and at varying levels of engagement.
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.