Teacher training in Vienna: “Approaches to AI and Data Literacy in Computer Science Education”

Artificial Intelligence technologies, though not always visible, are an integral part of students' everyday lives. In this context, young people are not only the ones who are always online feeding data to the "smart" algorithms but also the ones who actively and consciously use AI technology to be creative, to improve in different subject areas or to present themselves in the media. AI and Big Data are changing our world, and the importance of this topic for computer science education in schools is correspondingly high. But here, a few questions arise:

What should students know about AI and Big Data? What methods and materials can best support them in their learning? To address these questions, a teacher training was organized within the Erasmus+ project TrainDL. The event hosted by the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) took place in cooperation with the WG Didactics of Computer Science of the Freie Universität Berlin (FU) on January 31, 2023 in Vienna.

The first part of the workshop was an exchange about individual teaching experiences with AI and data literacy. This was followed by a short technical input on classical AI, machine learning and the data lifecycle. Afterwards, the participants tried out teaching materials on AI and conducted a data analysis using the visual tool Orange3. In doing so, they also considered ethical questions: who is allowed to collect which data? Which analyses are permissible?

The TrainDL team from the OCG and FU that led the workshop received positive feedback on the presented materials ond methods from the 25 participating computer science teachers.