Empowering AI Competences in~Children: The First Turning Point

This is an ongoing study describing the activities undertaken as part of the research project EmpAI: Empowerment of AI competencies. The goal is to test the effectiveness of a school-based training program to promote AI learning skills. Because it is important to establish evidence-based practices, as part of the project we identified four basic abilities that we hypothesize are functional for understanding some mechanisms underlying AI, and we designed an experiment to test the effectiveness of the training in promoting children's learning of such mechanisms. For each basic ability, we designed a game-based activity to be implemented in fifth and sixth grades in Italy. In this paper, we focus on the experience of implementing the activities in these classes. In particular, we collected a series of observations in the implementation of the activities, being particularly interested in the difficulties of the students and the differences in performance between the two grades. In particular, we observed different levels of participation and approach between the two grade levels in some activities. We will incorporate these observations into the follow-up project Impar.IA.mo, whose goal is to train teachers to replicate these activities in the regular school day.