Sabrina Shaner is confident that she's now ready to develop a curriculum for an elective course focused on exposing her high school students to artificial intelligence and how such technology can be used across disciplines.
As an elective teacher at City Charter High School in downtown Pittsburgh, Shaner was one of 28 teachers from 24 western Pennsylvania school districts who attended — at no cost to them — a week-long workshop program offered by Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science titled "Crash Course in Artificial Intelligence," which also featured a session on learning about material design.
The purpose of the program, funded in part by a $30,000 grant from The Grable Foundation, aimed to offer a common space for educators to learn more about AI so that these teachers can then go back to their respective schools and prepare courses or activities for their students, which itself is part of a larger effort that vies to prepare the region's workforce for a future where AI uses are likely to grow exponentially.
"I feel like AI is a more interesting topic in technology in general, just with the robots that you see [with] driverless cars in Pittsburgh, everyone's kind of aware of that," Shaner said. "I feel like [CMU] introduced the topics to us and explained it at a level so that we can understand it enough to create some materials for our kids. Plus, they've introduced us to different people in the industry who are local that we can make connections with. That will help not only our students, but ourselves as we learn as technology changes."
And that collaboration between experts, the other teachers attending the program and CMU faculty "is huge here," according to Brian Herrig, who teaches tech-ed classes for seventh and eighth grad students at Canonsburg Middle School. Both Herrig and Shaner said they learned about the program via CMU marketing outreach efforts.
"I can tell you at this workshop, more so probably than others that I've attended, even the lunch discussions are taking that spin; that it's not just 'I'm looking for a chance to get away from this content,' it's, 'hey, what were you thinking about this' walking to and from the car every day," Herrig said after noting that "pretty much 100%" of what he learned during the workshop will make its way into his curriculum. "I was approached by my administrator last year and he said, 'I'd like to see [AI in the classroom], what do you think?' And I said, 'I don't know, but I like the idea, but I don't know how to implement that. I'm not sure where to go.' And that's why the relationship with CMU and the programming and the faculty here has just been phenomenal."
The program's existence comes about a year after CMU hosted a day-long event for local teachers on how to incorporate AI lessons into the classroom. It's an effort that's been spearheaded by Stephanie Rosenthal and Pat Virtue, both of whom are assistant teaching professors within CMU's computer science and machine learning departments. They're both hoping that all of the teachers who attended the sessions are able to take something tangible back with them.
"It's easy — especially in these first three days where we just kind of aim a fire hose at them and make sure some water gets in their mouth — to just walk away more overwhelmed than with what you started with," Virtue said. "These past couple of days, the focus has been on building something concrete; some people are working on building a demo — an exercise — for an hour in their classroom; some people are working on a week-long activity that they can do post AP exams or in an engineering class; and then some people are looking at a whole course level where if you want to create an elective and what might that look like and what are the resources."
Rosenthal said she estimates about half of the teachers in attendance lead courses on computer science while others teach courses on math and science.
"They're really the experts about their classrooms, and so they know what topics things fit into and what they could see as sort of connecting," Rosenthal said. "AI is evolving and a lot of the things that they're teaching their students are things that are necessary to do in AI. There's linear algebra and there's calculus and science and data and research."
Rosenthal said teachers in the program have already started to ask if CMU will host it again next year, which she's optimistic will be possible.
"Hopefully we'll continue it on after this year," Rosenthal said. "It shouldn't be the last."
