What Can Youth Learn About Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in One Hour? Examining How Hour of Code Activities Address the Five Big Ideas of AI

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Hour of Code AI/ML activities align with Touretzky's five big ideas and ML concepts for middle and high school students. Through a content analysis of 47 AI-related HoC activities, it reveals a strong emphasis on perception and learning, with comparatively little attention to representation, reasoning, or hands-on construction, and a notable increase in activities addressing societal impact. Many activities lack explicit ML definitions and rely on audiovisual explanations rather than student-led inquiry, though some engage learners in data-driven model behaviors and training tasks. The authors propose design guidelines to broaden topic coverage, promote unplugged and collaborative experiences, emphasize learning algorithms beyond data, integrate societal impact, and develop accessible hands-on tools to advance AI literacy in K–12 education.

Abstract

The prominence of artificial intelligence and machine learning in everyday life has led to efforts to foster AI literacy for all K-12 students. In this paper, we review how Hour of Code activities engage with the five big ideas of AI, in particular with machine learning and societal impact. We found that a large majority of activities focus on perception and machine learning, with little attention paid to representation and other topics. A surprising finding was the increased attention paid to critical aspects of computing. However, we also observed a limited engagement with hands-on activities. In the discussion, we address how future introductory activities could be designed to offer a broader array of topics, including the development of tools to introduce novices to artificial intelligence and machine learning and the design of more unplugged and collaborative activities.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Diagram of the 5 big ideas in AI education proposed by Touretzky et al. touretzky2019envisioning and (in green box) details about what ML learning activities should promote touretzky2023machine
• Figure 2: Number of AI-related activities in HoC by date. Color indicates if these activities were labeled as AI activities by HoC and if we found evidence of the five big ideas.
• Figure 3: How HoC activities incorporate the big ideas. Colors indicate if big ideas were incorporated into hands-on activities, in telling activities, or both.
• Figure 4: Distribution of activities by number of big ideas present in each activity.
• Figure 5: How HoC activities addressed different aspects of ML. Colors indicate if these aspects were incorporated into hands-on activities, in telling activities, or both.