A Case Study of Using Machine Learning in K-12 Education

This full Research-to-Practice paper evaluates a Machine Learning (ML) course as a strategy to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) in middle school. AI is a technology that is increasingly present in our daily lives, and it is important that K-12 schools offer their students some basic first steps in this universe. Nonetheless, most initiatives to introduce ML aim at higher education, in undergraduate computing programs, and school initiatives usually lack the use of hardware to learn ML. In this context, we designed and implemented an introductory workshop on AI and ML for middle school students on the fundamentals of AI using TinyML and Arduino, and we assessed their attitudes towards 21st Century skills. Results show some ways how middle school students are impacted with the presentation of ML concepts and practices by building small applications, in addition to providing practice grounding to future educational interventions using TinyML as a tool to familiarize K-12 students with ML. Survey results point to very few post-intervention changes regarding 21st Century skills. Learned lessons point to a need to increase the course workload for more significant changes in students' perceptions.

I. Introduction

The current modern society offers a wide range of opportu-nities for those who master its technologies. The marketplace, increasingly demanding, lacks skilled workers at different lev-els of mastery of digital tools. Dealing with such an apparatus requires new skills, usually known as 21st century skills [1]. In this context, artificial intelligence is considered one of those technologies with a much greater expansion potential than it presents today. Everyday applications are already widely used by most users of digital services.