A Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science professor has helped develop new activities for teaching artificial intelligence to elementary, middle and high school students.

David Touretzky, a research professor in the Computer Science Department, collaborated with Christina Gardner-McCune, an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, to author the first titles in a collection of activity resource guides launched by the Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Initiative (AI4K12.org).

Touretzky founded and currently chairs AI4K12.org, which began in 2018 with the goal of developing national guidelines for AI education in grades K-12; establishing an online, curated resource directory to facilitate AI instruction; and creating a community of practitioners, researchers, and resource and tool developers focused on the AI for K-12 audience. Gardner-McCune co-chairs the initiative.

Each resource guide shows teachers how to conduct an activity with their students to demonstrate a concept in AI. For example, one guide focuses on teaching students to investigate speech recognition. The guide offers a series of experiments students can run on their web browser to test how the speech recognition engine employs contextual and cultural knowledge to resolve ambiguity in spoken language.

The guides are released under a Creative Commons license and are free for anyone to use. A grant from the NEOM Company funded the development of the guides. Learn more about the guides on the AI4K12.org website.