LearningML: A Tool to Foster Computational Thinking Skills Through Practical Artificial Intelligence Projects

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers new and thriving opportunities, but introduces also new risks and ethical issues that should be dealt with. We argue that the introduction of AI contents at schools through practical, hands-on, projects is the way to go to educate conscientious and critical citizens of the future, to awaken vocations among youth people, as well as to foster students' computational thinking skills. However, most existing programming platforms for education lack some of the required educational features to develop a complete understanding of AI. In this paper we present LearningML, a new platform aimed at learning supervised Machine Learning (ML), one of the most successful AI techniques that is in the basis of almost every current AI application. This work describes the main functionalities of the tool and discusses some decisions taken during its design. For its conception, we have taken into account lessons learned from the research literature on introducing AI in school and from the analysis of other educational tools built with the aim to allow learners to use ML. We offer as well some promising results obtained after a preliminary testing pilot workshop. Finally, the next steps in the development of LearningML are presented, focused on the face and instructional validation of the tool.