Mastering AI technology skills is becoming a major talent for employees in the industry. It has become a common phenomenon in the world’s famous universities to widely offer AI courses in computer and non-computer majors. Outside the scope of higher education campuses, teachers and students in grades K9–K12 have also realized the advent of the AI era. As candidates for higher education, these teenagers have many ambitions on learning AI technologies, they lack the mathematics, physics and programming knowledge required to develop AI technology, so they cannot jump directly into the development stage to produce creative contents. This paper proposes an Analogies-Based Learning Approach to teach teenagers fundamental AI concepts and knowledge. Although teenagers lack the basic knowledge of mathematics and physics required to understand AI, teenagers connect the common sense in their minds with specific technologies in AI through the teacher’s analogies. At the same time, the learners’ hobbies are also discovered and connected with these analogies, such as using basketball terms to describe the decision tree in machine learning. Some youth volunteers were selected to participate our research between K9 to K12 grade from different cities and schools over a three-year period. The preliminary findings based on the questionnaire show that compared with ordinary teaching methods, the analogy-based method can alleviate the anxiety and fear of young volunteers about AI learning and their acceptance of learning AI has improved.

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Analogy-Based Learning Approach for Teaching AI Fundamentals to Teens

  • Yi Yang ,
  • Hao Feng,
  • Beichen Lu,
  • Jiasong Sun

摘要

Mastering AI technology skills is becoming a major talent for employees in the industry. It has become a common phenomenon in the world’s famous universities to widely offer AI courses in computer and non-computer majors. Outside the scope of higher education campuses, teachers and students in grades K9–K12 have also realized the advent of the AI era. As candidates for higher education, these teenagers have many ambitions on learning AI technologies, they lack the mathematics, physics and programming knowledge required to develop AI technology, so they cannot jump directly into the development stage to produce creative contents. This paper proposes an Analogies-Based Learning Approach to teach teenagers fundamental AI concepts and knowledge. Although teenagers lack the basic knowledge of mathematics and physics required to understand AI, teenagers connect the common sense in their minds with specific technologies in AI through the teacher’s analogies. At the same time, the learners’ hobbies are also discovered and connected with these analogies, such as using basketball terms to describe the decision tree in machine learning. Some youth volunteers were selected to participate our research between K9 to K12 grade from different cities and schools over a three-year period. The preliminary findings based on the questionnaire show that compared with ordinary teaching methods, the analogy-based method can alleviate the anxiety and fear of young volunteers about AI learning and their acceptance of learning AI has improved.