Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

As established in the “Coordinated Plan on the development and use of Artificial Intelligence Made in Europe – 2018”, the creation of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) plan for the EU states is a key field for the European Union in the years to come. This plan must place the EU in a privileged position in this eminent technological revolution. To achieve such a challenging objective, a long-term education plan is mandatory, so AI topics are addressed in general education level, that is, previous to tertiary formation.

Consequently, the first approach to such general AI formation should be targeted to high school degrees, that is, students that will enter to the universities in a two/three years temporal horizon. These students will be the first generation that will encounter AI systems in their day-to-day life, and they will have to be prepared for that, understanding their operating principles and increasing their opportunities to enter the future job market.

The EU plan for AI emphasizes the social inclusion opportunities that will open in this new era, and encourages the member states to face them with specific actions. In this sense, a global training in intelligent systems for European high school students will help to provide equal opportunities between different regions regardless of their technological advance level. Moreover, it will help to reduce gender differences, because AI fields of application are very diverse, which can engage a wider range of personal interests, so girls will know them before they choose their university studies and specialization. This will lead to have more women employed in technical jobs in the near future, reducing the opportunity gap when accessing to better positions.

Considering this context, the present project has as its main objective:

The development of an Artificial Intelligence curriculum adapted to high school education in Europe

The curriculum will be targeted to students from 15 to 17 years old (upper secondary school and high school) with some previous basic formation in robotics and programming. It will cover a two-year period previous to their incorporation to tertiary education.

The AI teaching approach that will be followed in this proposal is aligned with EU recommendations, so it will be focused on embedded intelligence, that is, programming real-world devices that interact with the real environment. This requires to rely in some specific hardware elements in order to implement the teaching material. To this end, in order to follow the most general approach as possible, we establish a key premise in the project:

Using the student’s mobile phone (smartphone) as a central technological element to all educational material to be developed

Current smartphones have the technological level required for AI teaching in terms of sensors, actuators, computing power and communications; and they will have it in the future because they are in continuous update. They can be considered as general public devices, with a very similar presence in all the European states. This is very important for this proposal, because a large majority of high school students have their own Smartphone, so they can use it for learning. This significantly reduces the cost of introducing this discipline, and equalizes regions with different economic capacity.

The main results of the project correspond to four intellectual outputs:

1. A book (digital and printed) with teaching units for the teacher
2. A book (digital and printed) with activities for the student, as well as
3. AI Libraries and programming environments that allow high school students to develop the teaching units
4. A Best Practice Guide encompassing all the intangible results and conclusions extracted from the activities carried out during the project, both from a technical and from a social perspective.

The consortium is composed by five countries representing regions with different degrees of technological progress in the classroom, and covering the European region from east to west and from south to north. The coordinating team comes from the University of Coruña, in Spain, and it has a wide experience researching and teaching in AI and robotics. This team will develop all the intellectual outputs with the collaboration of the partner schools. Teachers will provide their pedagogical skills and experience to the project, while students will be used as testing groups in five training activities to generalize the teaching material to all the EU.

The global expected impact of this proposal is very ambitious: using the teaching material developed here as a reference for a future official curriculum in European secondary education. Regarding the participant organizations, the project will impact will on their technological capacity, will open the students’ possibilities to access to AI tertiary education, and will increase the international recognition of these educational centers as technological references

Project Website

http://aiplus.udc.es

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 371512 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSIDADE DA CORUNA & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 2IIS A-Ruiz
• Viesoji istaiga Panevezio profesinio rengimo centras
• CPI A Xunqueira
• Solski center Velenje
• Joensuun yhteiskoulun lukio
• IES David Bujan