Understanding Artificial Intelligence – A Project for the Development of Comprehensive Teaching Material

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential for far-reaching – in our opinion – irreversible changes. They range from effects on the individual and society to new societal and social issues. The question arises as to how students can learn the basic functioning of AI systems, what areas of life and society are affected by these and – most important – how their own lives are affected by these changes. Therefore, we are developing and evaluating school materials for the German ”Science Year AI”. It can be used for students of all school types from the seventh grade upwards and will be distributed to about 2000 schools in autumn with the support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The material deals with the following aspects of AI: Discussing everyday experiences with AI, how does machine learning work, historical development of AI concepts, difference between man and machine, future distribution of roles between man and machine, in which AI world do we want to live and how much AI would we like to have in our lives. Through an accompanying evaluation, high quality of the technical content and didactic preparation is achieved in order to guarantee the long-term applicability in the teaching context in the different age groups and school types. In this paper, we describe the current state of the material development, the challenges arising, and the results of tests with different classes to date. We also present first ideas for evaluating the results.