AI Curriculum for European High Schools: An Embedded Intelligence Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal of specific curriculum in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for high school students, which has been organized as a two-year subject. The curriculum was designed based on two premises. The first one is that, although the proposal is targeted to scientific programmes, the involved students and teachers do not have any previous knowledge about AI. Accordingly, the teaching units have been designed with the aim of supporting teachers in a new discipline for them and, in addition, providing an introductory level to students. The main didactical objective is to establish the fundamentals of AI from a practical perspective, learning technical concepts by using them to solve specific problems. The approach that has been followed in the teaching units is focused on developing embedded intelligence solutions, that is, programming real-world devices which interact with real environments. To this end, and to address a second fundamental premise of low investment capability at schools, it has been decided to use Smartphones as the central technological element to implement such embedded intelligence at classes. This curriculum has been developed within the Erasmus + project entitled "AI + : Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School". The project was carried out by a team of AI experts and high school teachers who created the teaching units, and a group of students that tested them for three years, providing feedback to make the curriculum feasible for its introduction in schools in the short-term. The main results obtained from its implementation within the project scope are presented and discussed here, with the aim of contributing to the AIEd community progress by means of a practical pilot experience. Although the curriculum has been designed and tested at European level, it has been created with a general perspective of AI education, so it can be applied worldwide.