The Ministry of Education announced the list of experimental areas for "New Teaching and Learning Models Based on Teaching Reform and Integrated Information Technology", requiring each experimental area to earnestly implement the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on "Leveraging the advantages of online education and artificial intelligence, innovative education and "Learning method" requirements. The small tank of Gerststein knew that it took one year from the selection of the experimental area to the announcement of the list, which shows how much the Ministry of Education attaches importance to exploring new teaching and learning models.
In recent years, with the continuous introduction of favorable policies related to artificial intelligence education, artificial intelligence education has gradually become a hot track driven by technology and the market, and public opinion has also emphasized the necessity of artificial intelligence education. So, how far are we from comprehensively universalizing AI education? As early as January 2017, the Ministry of Education officially issued the "Compulsory Education Elementary Science Curriculum Standards", which provided prerequisites for artificial intelligence education to enter campuses.
In the same year, the State Council formally issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" and pointed out that artificial intelligence has become a new focus of international competition. It is necessary to gradually develop a national intelligent education project, set up artificial intelligence-related courses in primary and secondary schools, gradually promote programming education, and build artificial intelligence disciplines. , Cultivate compound talents. As a result, artificial intelligence education and programming rose to the height of national strategy.
Subsequently, Zhejiang Province took the lead in including programming in the Zhejiang Provincial College Entrance Examination System. In 2018, Beijing, Shandong, Nanjing, Guangzhou and other places also included information technology (including programming) in the high school entrance examination project. In the "Notice on Recommending and Selecting the Experimental Area of "New Teaching and Learning Model Based on Teaching Reform and Integrated Information Technology" issued in October 2019, the Ministry of Education once again emphasized that it should be oriented towards the integration of information technology in subject teaching and interdisciplinary teaching Apply, explore the improvement of students' interdisciplinary thinking and innovation ability, and list "interdisciplinary teaching", "programming education", "artificial intelligence education" and "smart classroom" as keywords. The announcement of the list of experimental areas this time further promotes the development of programming and artificial intelligence education at the practical level.
In the face of favorable policies and a broad market, the track has become more popular, and products have continued to introduce new ones. However, from a practical perspective, artificial intelligence education has encountered a problem of popularization. According to statistics, the current penetration rate of artificial intelligence education in my country is still less than 2%. On the one hand, it is difficult to get started with artificial intelligence software, leading to high teaching and learning costs. Compared with other disciplines, artificial intelligence teaching and computer programming have a high degree of relevance, and many technology companies did not fully consider teaching scenarios when entering the game. Programming software that lacks scene applicability is quite difficult to use, which raises the threshold for popularization of artificial intelligence teaching. In actual teaching, it takes a lot of class hours for teachers to teach and students to use programming software, and it is even more difficult for students to take the initiative to create. On the other hand, artificial intelligence teaching courses are boring, far away from life scenes, and it is difficult to mobilize students' learning enthusiasm. In terms of course supply, the courses offered by many artificial intelligence companies are limited to software and have little relevance to life. They even use test questions to test the learning effect. Such teaching classes are also slightly ungrounded. The lack of artificial intelligence education combined with software and hardware teaching makes it difficult for students to understand the logic and effects of programming. Especially when the graphical programming is advanced to Python code programming teaching, the problem becomes more prominent. The teaching of pure code is boring and difficult to understand. Under such a curriculum system, the learning enthusiasm of students who are separated from the interaction of robots and hardware in artificial intelligence courses has also declined with the sense of novelty.
In the stage of artificial intelligence education in primary and secondary schools, how to reduce the difficulty of getting started with artificial intelligence software and reduce the cost of teaching and learning? How to fit the life scene, stimulate students' interest in learning artificial intelligence and programming, and avoid boring courses and declining interest in learning? How to use an effective and interesting combination of software and hardware to teach? These are problems that cannot be avoided when AI education is popularized. If these problems cannot be effectively solved, the full popularization of artificial intelligence education is bound to be difficult to achieve.