ABSTRACT
Artificial Intelligence (AI) education is a rapidly growing research area and a critical addition to K-12 education. However, little research has investigated how AI education can be taught at the K-12 level. As a result, teachers have lacked clarity on what they should do to incorporate AI, and they need additional scaffolding. This chapter first reviews a collection of K-12 AI education literature and identifies the essential knowledge and core competencies based on existing practices. We then report on a case study conducted at a Hong Kong primary school. In this study, we organised co-design workshops with the STEM teachers and explored how they can integrate AI education into their existing STEM education curriculum. Lesson Study has been widely used as a participatory teacher capacity-building model for advancing TPACK – an overarching set of skills needed for facilitating effective technology-based lessons. During Lesson Study, teachers work under the facilitation of the researcher to co-created lesson plans where AI essential knowledge and core competencies identified were embedded. The lesson plans were implemented to demonstrate if teachers could successfully apply the pedagogies learned in the workshops. Qualitative evaluation reveals that the Lesson Study were generally effective in raising teachers’ competency in integrative, learning-by-doing, and project-based AI lessons. This success suggests that Lesson Study with knowledgeable others could serve as entry points for Hong Kong K-12 schools incorporating AI education. We reflect on the co-designing experiences with the teachers and synthesise them into key “lessons learned” for K-12 AI education. Opportunities, challenges and issues, and future directions are discussed.
