Schlagwort: teaching

Teaching about AI – Teacher symposium

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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.

Fifty teachers and researchers share knowledge about teaching about AI.

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.

Teachers collaborated and shared their knowledge about teaching about AI.

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.

A Finnish perspective to teaching about AI.

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.

UNESCO provide important expertise.

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.

Teachers shared their knowledge about teaching about 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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25/02/2025
Learn how to teach computing to 5- to 11-year-olds
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Introducing children to computing concepts from a young age can help develop their interest and attachment to the subject. While parents might wonder what the best tools and resources are for this, primary and K1–5 educators also need to know what approaches work with their learners.

‘Teaching computing to 5- to 11-year-olds’ is one of the new course pathways we’ve designed to help educators spark young people’s interest in the subject. Our online courses are made by a team of writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts. They work together over months of production to create high-quality educational video content for participants all over the world.

This course pathway offers advice and practical activities to:
- Support young people to create and solve problems with technology
- Promote the relevance of computing in young people’s lives
- Create inclusive learning experiences
Our new course pathway for primary educators

The nine courses included give you a comprehensive understanding of teaching computing to younger learners (5- to 11-year-olds). All the courses have been written by a team of subject matter experts, education professionals, and teachers. Some of the courses cover a specific topic, such as programming or physical computing, while others help educators reflect on their teaching practice.

With Scratch, young people can learn how to program their own games, animations, stories, and more!

All of the courses include a range of ideas to use in your own programming sessions. The activities will help you to introduce concepts like computer networks and the internet to young learners in a relatable way. There are also activities to help learners progress within a topic, such as moving from a block-based programming language like Scratch to a text-based one like Python.

What will I gain from the courses?

The courses are an opportunity to:
- Discover new computing activities
- Get support from our team of course facilitators
- Meet other educators from around the world!
Do I need any previous experience with computing?

These courses will give you everything you need to teach computing to young learners. No computing experience is required.

There is also no specific order in which you need to complete the courses. We want educators to complete the courses in an order that makes sense to them.

If you are new to teaching computing, ‘Get started teaching computing in primary schools’ is the place to start. The four-week course will encourage you to think about why it’s important for your learners to build their understanding around computing. You’ll discover how to support learners to become digital makers who can use technology to solve problems. Everyone who registers on the course will have access to an action plan to help implement what they have learnt into their teaching practice.

Who is the pathway for?

These are free courses for anyone, anywhere, who is interested in teaching young people about computing.

How much time will I spend on each course?

All of the courses take between two and four weeks to complete, based on participants spending two hours a week on a course. You will have free access to each course for the length of time it takes to complete it. For example, if it’s a two week course, like ‘Creating an inclusive classroom: approaches to supporting learners with SEND in computing’, you will have two weeks of free access to the course.

Discover what you could learn with ‘Teaching computing to 5- to 11-year-olds’ today.

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21/07/2022
How do we create engaging online courses for computing educators?
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With our online courses programme, launched in 2017, we made it our mission to provide computing educators with the best possible free training we can design. Five years on, here are some of the key stats about the courses’ impact:
- We’ve produced and launched 35 free online courses
- We’ve created over 650 educational course videos
- More than 234,000 learners have participated in the courses
- Over 19,000 teachers in England have participated through the National Centre for Computing Education
Designed and created in-house, each and every course is a real cross-team effort that involves a lot of careful planning and a number of different stages. Here we’re taking you behind the scenes to show you how we make our courses, introduce you to the people involved, and explain how we ensure our courses are of high quality.

But first, here’s some quick answers to questions you may have:

Our free online courses — key questions answered

What are the courses?

They are online training courses to help you learn about computing and computing education. The courses are hosted on the FutureLearn website. They are asynchronous, meaning you can take them whenever and wherever you want.

Are the courses free?

Yes! All our courses are free when you sign up for time-limited access, which gives you full access to the learning materials for the complete course duration. FutureLearn also has a paid-for ‘unlimited’ option, where you receive a certificate for each course you take.

Are the courses right for me?

They are aimed at educators, particularly classroom teachers, but they are also beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more about computing.

How long does a course take?

To help you structure your learning, our courses are divided into three or four weeks, but it’s up to you how quickly you work through them. You can complete a course in one afternoon, or spread your learning out and study for 30 minutes a day over three or four weeks. This flexibility makes it easy to fit a course into a busy schedule.

How can I access the courses?
- Visit raspberrypi.org/courses to browse and select the course you want to sign up to.
- If you’re a teacher in England, visit the website of the National Centre for Computing Education, where our courses are part of the certificate programmes for primary and secondary teachers.
What goes into creating an engaging online course?

Creating our online courses is a team effort involving writers, videographers, illustrators, animators, copy editors, presenters, and subject matter experts working together over months of production. The entire process is guided by our online course producers, Martin O’Hanlon, Ross Exton, and Michael Conterio, who know a thing or two about creating high-quality learning experiences. We spoke to them about what it takes to create an engaging course.

The educators at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. On screen: Ross Exton. Left to right in person: Michael Conterio, Martin O’Hanlon.

Hi guys. You’ve created courses on a wide range of computing subjects. How do you decide what the focus of your next course is going to be?

Martin: We are driven by the needs of teachers. “What are teachers telling us they want to learn? Or what are the gaps in the curriculum where our learners need additional support?”

For example, our Introduction to Machine Learning and AI course was introduced as a result of feedback from teachers that while the subject wasn’t necessarily on the curriculum, they felt underprepared to answer questions from students or provide context when teaching other topics.

How do you then go about planning it out and turning that plan into an actual course structure?

Michael: Working with the course authors, we’ll generally agree on the big topics we want to cover or questions that we want to answer. We’ll often also have individual elements that we want to fit in somewhere, for example an activity involving making a learning resource more accessible. From there it’s a case of taking the bigger topics and working out how we can split them up into smaller chunks, until we get down to individual learning activities.

Ross: But then we’ll end up shuffling things around until we are happy — not only that we’ve got everything that we wanted to cover, but that the overall structure makes sense. We often talk about the ‘narrative’ of a course.

What is your approach to pedagogy in online courses?

Martin: At the Raspberry Pi Foundation we have a set of 12 pedagogy principles that we use through our learning resources (including online courses). We take particular care to lead with concepts, model processes, and activities; add variety for our learners; and include opportunities to create projects.

Learn more about the 12 principles in the free special edition of Hello World, The Big book of Computing Pedagogy, downloadable in PDF format.

Can you tell us about some of the pitfalls with course writing that you’ve learned along the way?

Michael: Because the learner is not present, you have to be incredibly precise with instructions as you can’t help learners directly as they are working through the content. And even if you think something is obvious, it’s easy for learners to accidentally miss an instruction, so it’s generally good to try to keep them together rather than spread out.

Martin: Luckily, it is often possible to tell from comments that learners have shared when something is hard to understand so we can improve future runs of the course.

How important is the media you add to the courses, like animations and videos? What is the process for creating this type of content?

Ross: It’s essential! It brings the abstract concepts of computing to life. The media in our courses helps our learners to visualise the ideas we’re presenting in ways that are engaging and relatable.

As we’re writing the course, we capture every creative idea that will best support our learners in gaining the knowledge and skills that they need. From ‘how-to’ guides with live coding, to physical computing demonstrations, or animations of robots, we think carefully about each image and video and how we’re not just telling the learner something, but showing them.

We then work with a brilliantly talented team of illustrators, animators, videographers, and presenters to create all of that media.

And… action! We film all the video content for courses in-house, working closely with the educators who present the content.

There are lots of opportunities for social learning within the courses. Can you explain more about its importance and how we integrate it?

Ross: Social learning is a really important part of our online courses experience. Over the past year we have made significant investment to make it easier for participants to share programs they’ve written as part of their learning, for example, and for facilitators to provide support.

Martin: It is important people have the opportunity to share their learning with others. This is something often lost when taking an online course and it can feel like you are ‘on your own’.

In the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online courses learners are given the opportunity to ask questions, share what they have created, and provide their own insight in the comments. Educators from the Foundation facilitate the courses — responding to comments and providing advice is a big part of what they do.

Thank you Martin, Michael, and Ross.

What new online course would you like us to create? Tell us in the comments below.

The post How do we create engaging online courses for computing educators? appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

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28/06/2022
Learning at home with the Raspberry Pi Foundation
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As the UK — like many countries around the world — kicks off the new year with another national lockdown, meaning that millions of young people are unable to attend school, I want to share an update on how the Raspberry Pi Foundation is helping young people to learn at home.

Please help us spread the word to teachers, school leaders, governors, parents, and carers. Everything we are offering here is 100% free and the more people know about it, the more young people will benefit.

Supporting teachers and pupils

Schools and teachers all over the world have been doing a heroic job over the past ten months, managing the transition to emergency remote teaching during the first round of lockdowns, supporting the most vulnerable pupils, dealing with uncertainty, changing the way that schools worked to welcome pupils back safely, helping pupils catch up with lost learning, and much, much more.

Both in my role as Chief Executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and as chair of governors at a state school here in Cambridge, I’ve seen first-hand the immense pressure that schools and teachers are under. I’ve also seen them display the most amazing resilience, commitment, and innovation. I want to say a huge thank you to all teachers and school staff for everything you’ve done and continue to do to help young people through this crisis.

Here’s some of the resources and tools that we’ve created to help you continue to deliver a world-class computing education:
- The Teach Computing Curriculum is a comprehensive set of lesson plans for KS1–4 (learners aged 5–16) as well as homework, progression mapping, and assessment materials.
- Working with the fabulous Oak National Academy, we’ve produced 100 hours of video for 300 video lessons based on the Teach Computing Curriculum.
- Isaac Computer Science is our online learning platform for advanced computer science (A level, learners aged 16–18) and includes comprehensive, interactive materials and videos. It also allows you to set your learners self-marking questions.
All of these resources are mapped to the English computing curriculum and produced as part of the National Centre for Computing Education. They are available for everyone, anywhere in the world, for free.

Making something fun with code

Parents and carers are the other heroes of remote learning during lockdown. I know from personal experience that juggling work and supporting home learning can be really tough, and we’re all trying to find meaningful, fun alternatives to letting our kids binge YouTube or Netflix (other video platforms and streaming services are available).

That’s why we’ve been working really hard to provide parents and carers with easy, accessible ways for you to help your young digital makers to get creative with technology:

Getting computers into the hands of young people who need them

One of the harsh lessons we learned last year was that far too many young people don’t have a computer for learning at home. There has always been a digital divide; the pandemic has just put it centre-stage. The good news is that the cost of solving this problem is now trivial compared to the cost of allowing it to persist.

That’s why the Raspberry Pi Foundation has teamed up with UK Youth and a network of grassroots youth and community organisations to get computers into the hands of disadvantaged young people across the UK.

For under £200 we can provide a vulnerable child with everything they need to learn at home, including a Raspberry Pi desktop computer, a monitor, a webcam, free educational software, and ongoing support from a local youth worker and the Foundation team. So far, we have managed to get 2000 Raspberry Pi computers into the hands of the most vulnerable young people in the UK. A drop in the ocean compared to the size of the problem, but a huge impact for every single young person and family.

This has only been possible thanks to the generous support of individuals, foundations, and businesses that have donated to support our work. If you’d like to get involved too, you can find out more here.

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06/01/2021
Raspberry Pi reaches more schools in rural Togo
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We’ve been following the work of Dominique Laloux since he first got in touch with us in May 2013 ahead of leaving to spend a year in Togo. 75% of teachers in the region where he would be working had never used a computer before 2012, so he saw an opportunity to introduce Raspberry Pi and get some training set up.

We were so pleased to receive another update this year about Dominique and his Togolese team’s work. This has grown to become INITIC, a non-profit organisation that works to install low cost, low power consumption, low maintenance computer rooms in rural schools in Togo. The idea for the acronym came from the organisation’s focus on the INItiation of young people to ICT (TIC in French).

The story so far

INITIC’s first computer room was installed in Tokpli, Togo, way back in 2012. It was a small room (see the photo on the left below) donated by an agricultural association and renovated by a team of villagers.
- The first INTIC room
- The new INTIC building
Fast forward to 2018, and INTIC had secured its own building (photo on the right above). It has a dedicated a Raspberry Pi Room, as well as a multipurpose room and another small technical room. Young people from local schools, as well as those in neighbouring villages, have access to the facilities.
The first ever dedicated Raspberry Pi room at K. Adamé
The first dedicated Raspberry Pi Room in Togo was at the Collège (secondary school) in the town of Kuma Adamé. It was equipped with 21 first-generation Raspberry Pis, which stood up impressively against humid and dusty conditions.
Kpodzi High School’s Raspberry Pi Room
In 2019, Kpodzi High School also got its own Raspberry Pi Room, equipped with 22 Raspberry Pi workstations. Once the projector, laser printer, and scanners are in place, the space will also be used for electronics, Arduino, and programming workshops.

What’s the latest?

Ready for the unveiling…

Now we find ourselves in 2020 and INTIC is still growing. Young people in the bountiful, but inaccessible, village of Danyi Dzogbégan now have access to 20 Raspberry Pi workstations (plus one for the teacher). They have been using them for learning since January this year.
The first Raspberry Pi sessions in Danyi Dzogbégan
We can’t wait to see what Dominique and his team have up their sleeve next. You can help INTIC reach more young people in rural Togo by donating computer equipment, by helping teachers get lesson materials together, or through a volunteer stay at one of their facilities. Find out more here.

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30/09/2020