Designing One Year Curriculum to Teach Artificial Intelligence for Middle School

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a common ingredient in everyday products and a part of early education. Educators teach the subject to inform students about their possible advantages and risks. Recently, various resources have been designed to teach AI, however, these resources generally fail to meet an interdisciplinary approach and do not narrate the overall picture of AI development. To address this gap, we developed a 36-week open-source AI curriculum for middle school education. Our contribution is threefold: (1) Providing interdisciplinary connections to reveal the background of developing a new technology (2) Structuring the recent resources in the field to ease the integration of AI into classrooms (3) Presenting an inclusive approach with online and unplugged activities. In this paper, we present the design process of our curriculum, details about the lecture structures and it's supplementary materials. Finally, we share our observations from the teacher (n=18) and student (n=60) workshops.