Commentary for the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education Special Issue on K-12 AI Education

In this commentary, I review the articles in the IJAIED Special Issue on K-12 AI Education. The articles offer compelling motivation for early AI education and cover an impressive range of approaches, grade levels, and perspectives. Despite the differences, there is coherence across the articles in terms of the goals to address AI awareness, knowledge, skills, and ethics. Deep consideration has gone into creating developmentally appropriate AI content, which is arguably the greatest challenge for a complex topic like AI. However, as we find in many emerging topics in education, the demand for curricula and lessons has outpaced the capacity of the field to do sufficient empirical research on how kids learn about AI. Evidence for many of the design choices reflected in the proposals put forth in this special issue is still emerging. The authors have done an admirable job of organizing their ideas around principles from the learning sciences and connecting their efforts to more general curriculum design efforts, such as the K12 CS Framework (2016). The next step, which is promoted by all of the authors in the special issue, is to define a research agenda to provide an empirical basis for the design of early AI learning experiences and inform future iterations of the curricula and frameworks proposed.