“ARTIE: Artificial Intelligence in Education - challenges and opportunities of the new era: development of a new curriculum, guide for educators and online course for students” is a strategic partnership composed of three schools and two organizations dedicated to school education: I. osnovna škola Čakovec (CRO), Agrupamento de Escolas do Barreiro (PT), I Spoleczna Szkola Podstawowa im. Unii Europejskiej w Zamosciu (PL), Croatian Robotics Association (CRO), and Nefinia (NE).

In today’s hyper-connected world, artificial intelligence is a vital competence, especially for kids and young people. They need to understand what is behind the screen of their smartphone, how artificial intelligence might be (mis)used and how social media works. Digitalisation is also changing how people work and what skills they need. Labor market has a major shortage of experts in field of AI. A recent report from IBM, Burning Glass and Business Higher Education Forum shows that the number of job opportunities for data and analytics skills will increase by 364,000 to 2,720,000 in 2020. Partners organizations noticed that the education system still did not develop a comprehensive educational resource for Primary and Secondary School level and only a few enthusiastic teachers are self-initiated and teach students about AI.

 

The ARTIE project outline a number of relevant European Commission policy objectives, which remain more valid than ever. These include:

-support for high-quality education

-improving its relevance

-developing Europeans’ digital skills and making them more visible

-boosting innovation and digital competences in all education institutions

-opening up education systems

 

Why are computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics computational thinking and coding the literacy of the future?

Artificial intelligence is fun and creative! Mankind has created since its first days with clay, stone, bricks, paper and wood. Today we are also creating but with a code. Artificial intelligence is empowering! You can do more than consume digital content; you can make things with code and make them accessible to millions. You can make social media marketing, games or control a computer or a robot with a code. Understanding the world. More and more things are connected. Grasping what is going on behind the screen enables us to understand the world better. Artificial intelligence teaches coding, robotics, computational thinking, problem solving, creativity, critical reasoning, analytical thinking and team work. 90% of jobs today need people with digital skills, which also includes AI, robotics and coding. Artificial intelligence is arguably the driving technological force of the first half of this century, and will transform virtually every industry, if not human endeavors at large. Businesses and governments worldwide are pouring enormous sums of money into a very wide array of implementations, and dozens of start-ups are being funded to the tune of billions of euros. It would be naive to think that AI will not have an impact on education—au contraire, the possibilities there are profound yet, for the time being, overhyped as well. This project with its intellectual outputs attempts to provide the right balance between reality and hype, between true potential and wild extrapolations. Every new technology undergoes a period of intense growth of reputation and expectations, followed by a precipitous fall when it inevitably fails to live up to the expectations, after which there is a slower growth as the technology is developed and integrated into our lives. This project is organized around a somewhat glib quote: “There are only two problems in education: What we teach, and how we teach it, of AI in education".

 

The ARTIE aims:

- the development of a comprehensive curriculum that will provide students in primary education with the early acquisition of knowledge and skills to develop future competences

- the development of methodological manuals, teaching plans, examples of good practice that will encourage teachers to teach the latest (rapidly changing) technology

- creating an international network of collaborating teachers, sharing experiences

- to share experiences and good practices at local, national and international level with teachers from different schools, local authorities, policy makers

- provide students with innovative educational content in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, deepen knowledge and skills, increase interest in jobs of the future

 

The ARTIE has the following objectives:

- explore current resources, tools, policy and best practice and provide the new curriculum, guidelines and recommendations for schools

- provide guidelines, recommendations and resources to the school community

- create and evaluate a specific and innovative methodology to address the identified needs based on teaching and learning artificial intelligence

- implement pilot workshops and activities in schools with different target groups to try-out, evaluate, validate and disseminate the methodology and resources

- assure the dissemination of each output to each target group to increase the use and multiplication of results, as well as project impact and sustainability