Last week, we were honoured to attend UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week conference to present our free Experience AI resources and how they can help teachers demystify AI for their learners.
The conference drew a worldwide audience in-person and online to hear about the work educators and policy makers are doing to support teachers’ use of AI tools in their teaching and learning. Speaker after speaker reiterated that the shared goal of our work is to support learners to become critical consumers and responsible creators of AI systems.
In this blog, we share how our conference talk demonstrated the use of Experience AI for pursuing this globally shared goal, and how the Experience AI resources align with UNESCO’s newly launched AI competency framework for students.
Presenting the design principles behind Experience AI
Our talk about Experience AI, our learning programme developed with Google DeepMind, focused on the research-informed approach we are taking in our resource development. Specifically, we spoke about three key design principles that we embed in the Experience AI resources:
Firstly, using AI and machine learning to solve problems requires learners and educators to think differently to traditional computational thinking and use a data-driven approach instead, as laid out in the research around computational thinking 2.0.
Secondly, every word we use in our teaching about AI is important to help young people form accurate mental models about how AI systems work. In particular, we focused our examples around the need to avoid anthropomorphising language when we describe AI systems. Especially given that some developers produce AI systems with the aim to make them appear human-like in their design and outputs, it’s important that young people understand that AI systems are in fact built and designed by humans.
Thirdly we described how we used the SEAME framework we adapted from work by Jane Waite (Raspberry Pi Foundation) and Paul Curzon (Queen Mary University, London) to categorise hundreds of AI education resources and inform the design of our Experience AI resources. The framework offers a common language for educators when assessing the content of resources, and when supporting learners to understand the different aspects of AI systems.
By presenting our design principles, we aimed to give educators, policy makers, and attendees from non-governmental organisations practical recommendations and actionable considerations for designing learning materials on AI literacy.
How Experience AI aligns with UNESCO’s new AI competency framework for students
At Digital Learning Week, UNESCO launched two AI competency frameworks:
- A framework for students, intended to help teachers around the world with integrating AI tools in activities to engage their learners
- A framework for teachers, “defining the knowledge, skills, and values teachers must master in the age of AI”
AI competency framework for students
We have had the chance to map the Experience AI resources to UNESCO’s AI framework for students at a high level, finding that the resources cover 10 of the 12 areas of the framework (see image below).
For instance, throughout the Experience AI resources runs a thread of promoting “citizenship in the AI era”: the social and ethical aspects of AI technologies are highlighted in all the lessons and activities. In this way, they provide students with the foundational knowledge of how AI systems work, and where they may work badly. Using the resources, educators can teach their learners core AI and machine learning concepts and make these concepts concrete through practical activities where learners create their own models and critically evaluate their outputs. Importantly, by learning with Experience AI, students not only learn to be responsible users of AI tools, but also to consider fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy when they create AI models.
Teacher competency framework for AI
UNESCO’s AI competency framework for teachers outlines 15 competencies across 5 dimensions (see image below). We enjoyed listening to the launch panel members talk about the strong ambitions of the framework as well as the realities of teachers’ global and local challenges. The three key messages of the panel were:
- AI will not replace the expertise of classroom teachers
- Supporting educators to build AI competencies is a shared responsibility
- Individual countries’ education systems have different needs in terms of educator support
All three messages resonate strongly with the work we’re doing at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Supporting all educators is a fundamental part of our resource development. For example, Experience AI offers everything a teacher with no technical background needs to deliver the lessons, including lesson plans, videos, worksheets and slide decks. We also provide a free online training course on understanding AI for educators. And in our work with partner organisations around the world, we adapt and translate Experience AI resources so they are culturally relevant, and we organise locally delivered teacher professional development.
The teachers’ competency framework is meant as guidance for educators, policy makers, training providers, and application developers to support teachers in using AI effectively, and in helping their learners gain AI literacy skills. We will certainly consult the document as we develop our training and professional development resources for teachers further.
Towards AI literacy for all young people
Across this year’s UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, we saw that the role of AI in education took centre stage across the presentations and the informal conversations among attendees. It was a privilege to present our work and see how well Experience AI was received, with attendees recognising that our design principles align with the values and principles in UNESCO’s new AI competency frameworks.
We look forward to continuing this international conversation about AI literacy and working in aligned ways to support all young people to develop a foundational understanding of AI technologies.
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