Bits, Bytes and Tidbits: A TrainDL weekend workshop
From 24th to 26th November, Friday to Sunday, 24 computer science teachers gathered in Zeitz, a historically rich city in Saxony-Anhalt. For 45 hours, a former hospital that has now been converted into hotel rooms was the venue, and the team immersed themselves in AI and Data Literacy activities in the old pasta factory, now a high co-working space. Problems from the field of data science are best explained based on real-life problems. The team chose "food" as the thematic context for the workshop to match the ambiance.
The workshop began with an introduction to artificial intelligence and an update on the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field of research. The participants, all teachers aged between 30 and 65, then took on the role of students and worked on an exercise in the creative application of artificial intelligence: generating recipes for fruit cocktails. The new recipes could then be mixed and tried out.
The exercises continued the next day with additional teaching materials. The highlight was a presentation by Lana Issa, who researches "Creative Artificial Intelligence" at Freie Universität. She analyzed the typical composition of Greek dishes and presented an algorithm to generate new recipes.
This also formed the basis for a data workshop, in which the participants recorded the menus of various pizzerias during an excursion to the city center of Zeitz. One of the learning objectives of this practical approach was to understand data acquisition and cleansing as a prerequisite for subsequent data analysis, and to learn about potential sources and types of errors.
The Saturday evening started with manual work: the participants gave free rein to their culinary creativity by baking pizzas together in the pasta factory's own stone oven. The teachers then shared teaching materials and competed in a prompt battle: who could formulate a prompt that would generate an AI image that looked as similar as possible to a Picasso?
Sunday morning once again allowed teachers to delve into various areas of artificial intelligence (language models, image recognition) and data science (decision trees, price predictions). At stations, they were able to try out the teaching materials at their own pace and discuss their possible use in the classroom. Finally, the exchange continued on a more abstract level and the teachers formed an opinion on what skills pupils should have in the field of artificial intelligence and data science, and looked back on the joint work in focus groups. The conclusion of the workshop was overwhelmingly positive: the creative atmosphere and the thematic context of the food, which made it easier for pupils to get to grips with data, were praised. The creative ambiance of the venue was well received and contributed to the successful dialogue.
Tired and satisfied, the participants returned home. The interviews from the focus groups and the data from the quantitative surveys are currently being analyzed by the project partners at the University of Potsdam. This analysis will provide the TrainDL project with important insights into the targeted design of teacher training in artificial intelligence and data literacy, enabling the quick integration of these important topics into European school education. This will ensure that the upcoming generation is trained in a future-oriented manner.
