Classroom Activities for Teaching Artificial Intelligence to Primary School Students

Abstract

It is inevitable that the primary school students today will grow up in a world in which computer programs that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will be prevalent in many aspects of their lives and their future workplaces. In our experience, primary school students often find the concept of AI quite mysterious and possibly scary. Teachers are often not well equipped to thoroughly explain key concepts in AI. This paper summarises our own experience designing and implementing classroom activities for teaching fundamental concepts of AI to Year 6 students in a school in Sydney, Australia. The main goal of our activities is to demystify AI by showing them AI can be thought of different ways in which a computer simulates human-like behaviours. In particular, we present two hands-on activities – an unplugged activity on facial recognition, and a simple robotic exercise that introduces the concept of machine learning. We hope this paper will ignite discussions about how AI can be taught effectively at the K-12 levels.