Education and Awareness for Artificial Intelligence

The increasing digitization and automation processes in daily life through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose great challenges for society and education. These range from building awareness, increasing acceptance, and teaching the foundations of this important and disruptive technology, to fostering a meaningful, creative usage, an assessment of threats, opportunities, and potentials as well as allowing an informed discussion about the technology. This paper presents the 2-year international AI education and awareness project ‘ENARIS’ which addressed these challenges on various levels. On the one hand, the project fostered young people’s interest in AI and facilitated a basic technical understanding. In this context, the integration of teachers, using a train-the-trainer approach and providing ready-to-use, open educational resources based on sound didactic concepts was an essential factor. On the other hand, the project aimed at strengthening awareness regarding social, economic, and technical aspects and potentials of AI among the general public, including school students, children, parents or working persons by conducting open and easily-accessible workshops. In the first project stage, online pre-surveys were conducted to analyze the needs within the target groups. Based on the results, AI ready-to-use prototype learning modules were developed. Following the principles of constructionism, a combination of different teaching methods including unplugged and plugged activities was used. The second project stage dealt with implementing and evaluating pilot workshops using quantitative pre- and post-tests as well as qualitative measures. Results indicate that, a) the ready-to-use teaching material, train-the-trainer workshops and AI topics covered were well received and that, b) a significant positive impact regarding the awareness and general knowledge about AI was achieved.