AI education guidelines are organized around the 5 Big Ideas in AI. The guidelines define what every student should know about AI and what they should be able to do with it. The guidelines will serve as a framework to assist standards writers and curriculum developers on AI concepts, essential knowledge, and skills by grade band.
Big Idea 1 – Perception
Computers perceive the world using sensors. Perception is the process of extracting meaning from sensory signals. Making computers “see” and “hear” well enough for practical use is one of the most significant achievements of AI to date.
Big Idea 2 – Representation & Reasoning
Agents maintain representations of the world and use them for reasoning. Representation is one of the fundamental problems of intelligence, both natural and artificial. Computers construct representations using data structures, and these representations support reasoning algorithms that derive new information from what is already known. While AI agents can reason about very complex problems, they do not think the way a human does.
Big Idea 3 – Learning
Computers can learn from data. Machine learning is a kind of statistical inference that finds patterns in data. Many areas of AI have progressed significantly in recent years thanks to learning algorithms that create new representations. For the approach to succeed, tremendous amounts of data are required. This “training data” must usually be supplied by people, but is sometimes acquired by the machine itself.
Big Idea 4 – Natural Interaction
Intelligent agents require many kinds of knowledge to interact naturally with humans. Agents must be able to converse in human languages, recognize facial expressions and emotions, and draw upon knowledge of culture and social conventions to infer intentions from observed behavior. All of these are difficult problems. Today’s AI systems can use language to a limited extent, but lack the general reasoning and conversational capabilities of even a child.
Big Idea 5 – Societal Impact
AI can impact society in both positive and negative ways. AI technologies are changing the ways we work, travel, communicate, and care for each other. But we must be mindful of the harms that can potentially occur. For example, biases in the data used to train an AI system could lead to some people being less well served than others. Thus, it is important to discuss the impacts that AI is having on our society and develop criteria for the ethical design and deployment of AI-based systems.