Search

With the push to integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) from kindergarten to twelfth-grade levels comes a need for equipped teachers. However, there needs to be more initiative in professional learning opportunities, which demands the required effort to ensure teachers learn the AI content they will be teaching. To design an effective professional development program, understanding teachers' existing knowledge, interest and disposition towards AI is crucial to devise strategies that could best support the teachers. As a result, this study aims to investigate in-service teachers' perspectives of teaching AI in schools from the perspective of planned behavior theory. Using a 7-factor scale of AI Anxiety, AI Readiness, AI Relevance, Attitude towards using AI, AI for Social Good, Confidence in AI and Behavioral Intention. This study sampled 159 in-service teachers in Namibia. The teachers' responses were analyzed with SmartPLS using Structural Equation Modelling and various Multigroup Analysis techniques. This study found that teachers' behavioral intention to teach AI depends on a combination of factors, including the relevance of AI, attitude towards using AI, the use of AI for social good and confidence. Meanwhile, AI Anxiety and readiness could not be linked to the intention to teach AI. We discussed our findings, highlighted the study implication, and suggested future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presented work provides a comprehensive evaluation of the current availability of education programs and courses related to of AI the field of Information Technologies and Computer Science in higher education institutions (HIEs) in the Republic of Bulgaria. More specifically, this study examines 163 bachelor’s and 239 master’s degree programs from 28 HEIs available during the 2023/24 academic year in four professional fields: (1) Electrical Engineering, Electronics, and Automation; (2) Communication and Computer Technologies; (3) Informatics and Computer Science; and (4) Mathematics. The conducted evaluation shows that 41.1% of evaluated BSc programs and 26.4% of MSc programs include at least one AI-dedicated course. Results indicate a significant presence of AI-focused education, particularly in degrees related to Informatics and Computer Science, where 47.8% of AI courses are concentrated. However, a notable disparity exists in the inclusion of AI subjects across other technical fields, particularly in Electrical Engineering and related degrees, which contain only 8% of the identified AI courses for BSc degree programs. The findings highlight the need for a broader and more accelerated integration of AI education to meet the evolving demands of both students and the labor market. This work underscores the importance of strategic curriculum adaptation to enhance the readiness of Bulgarian HEIs to support the development and application of AI technologies, addressing the skills gap and fostering a workforce capable of navigating the AI-driven future.

Abstract This research explored the creative thinking, learning achievement, and engagement of students when they integrated the application of the personal audio classifier (PAC) into the competition of a computational thinking (CT) board game (i.e., the experimental group), or did not integrate it into the competition but only collaborated with peers to test the function of the program which they had developed (i.e., the control group). The students had experienced popular speech recognition usage in their daily life, such as Siri and Google Assistant; therefore, this study developed instructional material for university freshmen to learn to develop their own artificial intelligence (AI) application (app) on a smart phone with PAC in MIT App Inventor. The PAC platform and the learning material cultivated students to train their own voice classification model, which is a form of supervised machine learning in the AI domain. The results showed that both groups, who had successfully trained computers to distinguish received voice commands with PAC receiving the human voice spectrogram via the cloud platform developed by MIT, made significant progress in their learning effectiveness in AI education. When the students employed the AI app on smartphones in the CT board game, the students’ voice commands could be classified, and then the corresponding command could be executed through the program to control the action of the robot car on the map, regardless of whether they were competing or not. This study not only successfully provided the students with simple AI learning material, but also cultivated their creative thinking, as identified in the survey of the computational thinking self-efficacy scale. During the process of completing a mobile phone application with AI, students should know and use the function of voice classification to achieve goals and expand their cognition of AI applications. This study concluded that the AI learning material for general students rather than students in the department of computer science facilitated the students’ engagement.

A growing number of courses seek to increase the basic artificial-intelligence skills (“AI literacy”) of their participants. At this time, there is no valid and reliable measurement tool that can be used to assess AI-learning gains. However, the existence of such a tool would be important to enable quality assurance and comparability. In this study, a validated AI-literacy-assessment instrument, the “scale for the assessment of non-experts’ AI literacy” (SNAIL) was adapted and used to evaluate an undergraduate AI course. We investigated whether the scale can be used to reliably evaluate AI courses and whether mediator variables, such as attitudes toward AI or participation in other AI courses, had an influence on learning gains. In addition to the traditional mean comparisons (i.e., t-tests), the comparative self-assessment (CSA) gain was calculated, which allowed for a more meaningful assessment of the increase in AI literacy. We found preliminary evidence that the adapted SNAIL questionnaire enables a valid evaluation of AI-learning gains. In particular, distinctions among different subconstructs and the differentiation constructs, such as attitudes toward AI, seem to be possible with the help of the SNAIL questionnaire.

Cultivating students' key competencies contributes to students' adaptation to the fast developing intelligent era. Artificial intelligence education is an important way to cultivate students' key competencies. It is increasingly important to set up appropriate artificial intelligence courses at the fundamental education stage and cultivate students' key competencies via such courses. This paper describes quantitatively how AI courses cultivate students' key competencies. First, we analyze the necessity of artificial intelligence education at the fundamental education stage and the status quo of artificial intelligence education in China. Next, we elaborate the students' key competencies which is composed of knowledge competence, team competence and learning competence, and design the curriculum of artificial intelligence at the fundamental education stage. Finally, through collecting students' questionnaires, we analyze the relationship between the curriculum of artificial intelligence and the cultivation of students' key competencies. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the 7 categories of artificial intelligence courses are beneficial to the cultivation of the six key sub-competencies of students. In addition, the problems in the current artificial intelligence curriculum are identified and suggestions for improvement are put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]