AI has become a pervasive term that is heard with trepidation, excitement, and often a furrowed brow in school staffrooms. For educators, there is pressure to use AI applications for productivity — to save time, to help create lesson plans, to write reports, to answer emails, etc. There is also a lot of interest in using AI tools in the classroom, for example, to personalise or augment teaching and learning. However, without understanding AI technology, neither productivity nor personalisation are likely to be successful as teachers and students alike must be critical consumers of these new ways of working to be able to use them productively. 

In both England and globally, there are few new AI-based curricula being introduced and the drive for teachers and students to learn about AI in schools is lagging, with limited initiatives supporting teachers in what to teach and how to teach it. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, we decided it was time to investigate this missing link of teaching about AI, and specifically to discover what the teachers who are leading the way in this topic are doing in their classrooms.  

A day of sharing and activities in Cambridge

We organised a day-long, face-to-face symposium with educators who have already started to think deeply about teaching about AI, have started to create teaching resources, and are starting to teach about AI in their classrooms. The event was held in Cambridge, England, on 1 February 2025, at the head office of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. 

Over 150 educators and researchers applied to take part in the symposium. With only 50 places available, we followed a detailed protocol, whereby those who had the most experience teaching about AI in schools were selected. We also made sure that educators and researchers from different teaching contexts were selected so that there was a good mix of primary to further education phases represented. Educators and researchers from England, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland were invited and gathered to share about their experiences. One of our main aims was to build a community of early adopters who have started along the road of classroom-based AI curriculum design and delivery.

Inspiration, examples, and expertise

To inspire the attendees with an international perspective of the topics being discussed, Professor Matti Tedre, a visiting academic from Finland, gave a brief overview of the approach to teaching about AI and resources that his research team have developed. In Finland, there is no compulsory distinct computing topic taught, so AI is taught about in other subjects, such as history. Matti showcased tools and approaches developed from the Generation AI research programme in Finland. You can read about the Finnish research programme and Matti’s two month visit to the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre in our blog. 

Attendees were asked to talk about, share, and analyse their teaching materials. To model how to analyse resources, Ben Garside from the Raspberry Pi Foundation modelled how to complete the activities using the Experience AI resources as an example. The Experience AI materials have been co-created with Google DeepMind and are a suite of free classroom resources, teacher professional development, and hands-on activities designed to help teachers confidently deliver AI lessons. Aimed at learners aged 11 to 14, the materials are informed by the AI education framework developed at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre and are grounded in real-world contexts. We’ve recently released new lessons on AI safety, and we’ve localised the resources for use in many countries including Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

In the morning session, Ben exemplified how to talk about and share learning objectives, concepts, and research underpinning materials using the Experience AI resources and in the afternoon he discussed how he had mapped the Experience AI materials to the UNESCO AI competency framework for students.

Kelly Shiohira, from UNESCO, kindly attended our session, and gave an invaluable insight into the UNESCO AI competency framework for students. Kelly is one of the framework’s authors and her presentation helped teachers understand how the materials had been developed. The attendees then used the framework to analyse their resources, to identify gaps and to explore what progression might look like in the teaching of AI.

Throughout the day, the teachers worked together to share their experience of teaching about AI. They considered the concepts and learning objectives taught, what progression might look like, what the challenges and opportunities were of teaching about AI, what research informed the resources and what research needs to be done to help improve the teaching and learning of AI.

What next?

We are now analysing the vast amount of data that we gathered from the day and we will share this with the symposium participants before we share it with a wider audience. What is clear from our symposium is that teachers have crucial insights into what should be taught to students about AI, and how, and we are greatly looking forward to continuing this journey with them.

As well as the symposium, we are also conducting academic research in this area, you can read more about this in our Annual Report and on our research webpages. We will also be consulting with teachers and AI experts. If you’d like to ensure you are sent links to these blog posts, then sign up to our newsletter. If you’d like to take part in our research and potentially be interviewed about your perspectives on curriculum in AI, then contact us at: rpcerc-enquiries@cst.cam.ac.uk 

We also are sharing the research being done by ourselves and other researchers in the field at our research seminars. This year, our seminar series is on teaching about AI and data science in schools. Please do sign up and come along, or watch some of the presentations that have already been delivered by the amazing research teams who are endeavouring to discover what we should be teaching about AI and how in schools

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