Kick-off of the second intervention cycle: The TrainDL workshops are back

In the last months, there have been more and more interventions in the TrainDL project as the first cycle of interventions came to a close. Last week, there have been even two in one day: they mark the start of the second round of interventions, where the partners will now implement their learnings from the first phase. The project’s run time comprises three cycles in total.

On March 9, 26 computer science educators took part in the workshops that were conducted as part of the 19th IBBB Conference: the GI Conference on School Computer Science in Berlin and Brandenburg. This time around, it took place at the institute for informatics of the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. You can find a German program of the day here.

The participants could look forward to three thematic sections in each of the workshops: The TrainDL team started off the sessions with a presentation titled: “AI & Data Literacy: Or what remains of the hype in the era of generative AI?” This was followed by two practical exercises. On the one hand, there was the exercise “Grimm's new fairy tales”, consisting of unplugged activities as well as tasks using the Jupyter Notebook. The other case example had the goal of detecting the risks of language models in everyday life through reality-based stories.

These practical exercises aim to convey basic principles of AI technologies like language models, generative AI and such to students and enable them to explore machine learning methods. How well these topics and methods were taught in these particular workshops was evaluated by the University of Potsdam, the TrainDL partner responsible for Evaluation and Quality Assurance.