Interdisciplinary AI + Data Lab in Teacher Education

Type of event: Seminar
Institution: Faculty of Educational Science
Funding period: 01.04.2023 until 31.03.2024
Short title: Teacher AID Lab

Extract from the funding application: "In the teaching-learning lab, students encounter an extracurricular learning space in which they acquire extensive AI and data skills on the one hand and didactic skills through practical and low-threshold exercises on the other, while at the same time gaining practical teaching experience with secondary school students."

The Teacher AID Lab project

The development of the teaching project was driven by several key factors. One central reason is the urgent need to provide (prospective) teachers with data and AI literacy throughout their education. Despite the growing importance of data and AI in society, there is a lack of programmes in teacher education that do justice to these topics. The focus is often only on utilisation (e.g. "prompting") and not on understanding the technological perspective of AI.

Another factor was the feedback from the students, who wanted more practical content beyond the usual school internships. This highlighted the need for a closer connection to real professional practice and led to the decision in favour of an extracurricular learning location as a cooperation partner.

The overarching goal remains the firm integration of low-threshold, practice-oriented programmes into the teacher training curriculum. Access to this content must be facilitated and firmly anchored so that prospective teachers acquire the necessary skills to meet the demands of the modern education system.

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Review and results

The teaching project has achieved important results for teacher training and the promotion of (prospective) teachers' AI skills. It is one of the first programmes in the field of "AI Literacy" in teacher training at the University of Hamburg and an essential step towards the contemporary training of future teachers. The project promotes the professionalisation of teachers in the digital transformation of schools and teaching under the conditions of AI.

Students can now understand technological and social aspects of AI and data practices and develop didactic approaches to teach this content. The practical approach enables a better understanding through direct work with pupils and facilitates the use of AI systems.

The project offers a re-usable, optional course on data and AI skills in the teacher training programme, which sustainably strengthens data/AI literacy education at Universität Hamburg. It has a positive impact on students and future generations of pupils. The event addressed central competences of the "AI4K12" framework, including:

Explain data, data formats, structures and storage as well as associated terminology and concepts
differentiate and explain the concepts and methods behind the collective term "artificial intelligence", in particular the functioning of machine learning
categorise data and AI concepts according to subject/application and apply them to their own projects.

Tips from lecturers for lecturers

The reflection on meaningful teaching formats for the project objectives is reflected in the seminar design of this course. Due to the high practical relevance for schools, it was particularly appropriate to meet the students mainly in face-to-face lessons in a flipped classroom format. Moodle was used to accompany the seminar and a corresponding course was developed in line with the seminar structure. This also included an online-only unit, for which there was no room during the face-to-face sessions. Unfortunately, this online unit was very poorly received. Based on the feedback, the students felt overwhelmed by the wealth of information they were given for self-study in the digital space.

This important realisation will be incorporated into the future (digital) didactic concept for teaching. Another hurdle was that students (external to UHH) could not access Moodle, which is why a separate Moodle had to be installed and the corresponding courses for the individual projects in the seminar had to be entered there.