Teacher training seminars in Lithuanian regional schools

On April 7 and 8, 2022, a team from Vilnius University (Prof. Valentina Dagienė, Ph.D. student Vaida Masiulionytė-Dagienė and volunteer Alvida Lozdienė) visited the schools Kretinga Marijonas Daujotas and Klaipėda Gedminai. The aim of the trip was to introduce primary school teachers to the possibilities of teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data literacy.

More than 20 teachers participated at the Kretinga progymnasium. Among them were not only primary school teachers but also subject teachers. The teachers learned about what AI actually is, learned about its emergence and development, and carried out practical tasks. For the practical part, they chose unplugged gamified activities. By playing board games, teachers explored how AI can learn on its own and how its performance changes depending on how much knowledge the AI has managed to accumulate.

The same workshop took place at Klaipėda Gedminai Progymnasium. It was attended by around 20 primary and secondary school teachers, including a new teacher from Ukraine and several teachers from Portugal, Greece and Turkey, who were visiting the school at the time. The seminar was conducted in Lithuanian with English translation. The TrainDL team also presented ideas for exercises that will be applied in the next phases of the TrainDL project. After the workshop, the team received insights from several teachers on their opinions on the exercises. 

Participants from both Kretinga Marijonas Daujotas Progymnasium and Klaipėda Gedminai Progymnasium gave the feedback that presenting the topics through different gamified activities helped them understand and master the basic principles of AI. The teachers provided useful insights on how the tasks could be improved.