Last week, I had the interesting experience of giving evidence at a hearing of our House of Lords Artificial Intelligence select committee. The House of Lords is the (entirely unelected) upper house of the UK’s legislature, so for me, this was quite a big deal.

Their lordships were interested in the applications of AI to education in general, but they seemed much more interested in the opportunities that England’s computing curriculum would provide for our students to learn about AI.

In terms of the uses of AI in schools, we’re already seeing a fair few applications of machine learning and other aspects, and I think these look set to continue in the short to medium term. I certainly don’t see AIs replacing teachers any time soon, but I think there are plenty of aspects of the teacher’s role where some support from smart machines might be quite welcome, for example in assessment, with marking essays, judging the quality, rather than merely the correctness of a student’s code; in recommending appropriately challenging activities, resources and exercises for students; in carefully monitoring student activity, privacy concerns notwithstanding; and in responding quickly to students’ questions or requests for help.

If teaching can be reduced merely to setting work and marking work, then I would fear for the long term future of the profession: ‘Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be’, as Arthur C Clarke famously put it. My Roehampton students think there’s much more to teaching than this though: teaching students how to be a person, how to get on with other people, and inspiring them to learn things that they’re not already interested in, to give just three examples. I don’t see the machines taking over these responsibilities any time soon.

More interesting are the opportunities to teach students about AI as part of CS education, or the broader school curriculum. The English programmes of study for computing are phrased broadly enough to allow, or perhaps even encourage, students to develop a grasp of how AI, and particularly machine learning, works, in age-appropriate ways from age five to eighteen. CSTA’s new standards allow scope for pupils to learn about machine learning too: between 3rd and 10th grade students should be able to use data to highlight or propose cause and-effect relationships and predict outcomes; refine computational models based on the data they have generated; and create computational models that represent the relationships among different elements of data collected.

There are some great tools out there to make this accessible to students, from Google’s teachablemachine, through Dale Lane’s fabulous, IBM Watson powered, machinelearningforkids.co.uk, to building machine learning classifiers in Mathematica (easy!) and Python (more tricky, but really not out of the question), as well as the fun that can be had building simple chatbots in Scratch or Python, and hacking Google Assistant using the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s AIY kit.

Great as these opportunities are, I am concerned that we’re not doing enough in schools to get students thinking through the ethical implications for individuals, society and civilisation of AI. Worryingly, England’s education ministers removed the wider ethical references to the computing curriculum we’d developed. Machine learning algorithms already make life-changing decisions for many of us, and the impact of these technologies on our lives seems likely to only increase over our students’ lives. Education is, at least in part, about preparing our students for the opportunities, experiences and responsibilities of their later lives, and I’m not sure we can do justice to this if we’re not teaching them how AI works, and to think through some of the big questions about how AI should be used.

Miles Berry, International Representative

Throughout my professional career—academia, industry, government, I’ve been involved with many boards. Most of my experiences have be positive; most of them were part of loving, respectful, inclusive communities. I’ve served on boards that focus on teaching in higher education, boards that are charged with the welfare of a community, boards that are responsible for specific events, boards that are strictly oversight or advisory and others that are active doers.

I have recently been lucky enough to join the CSTA Board of Directors. Based on my early experience, the CSTA Board is a hybrid of doers and overseers. It’s a wonderful mix of high school teachers, higher education faculty, state and local K-12 administrators and industry representatives.

When you attend the CSTA Annual Conference, or participate in one of the many activities offered from the chapters or other members of the CSTA community, all of these people, ideas and activities have somehow, someway passed by the attention of the CSTA Board. Board members are active participants in all areas of the organization and execution of the Annual Conference, aiding the conference chairs with whatever and helping keep the Board posted on all of the great ideas and activities. The Chapters as well are encouraged by the Board, which always welcomes their creative ideas. Board members live to be enablers!

In addition, at my first (and currently only) face to face meeting, we dealt with more serious issues like the budget and strategic plans. I was impressed with the many ideas and differing perspectives offered by all of the members of the Board—this isn’t a shy group! I was also happy to see how respectful and seriously everyone reacted to divergent opinions. We’re all trying to do our best for CSTA. It’s amazing how much business gets covered in this one-day meeting. To keep up to date and keep moving forward, we also have monthly video and conference calls with full agendas, too. I appreciate well-run meetings where people do get a chance to visit and catch up but where the focus still on getting the business done. Fred Martin (CSTA Board Chair) is a master!

We all know that it’s really fun, useful and professionally stimulating to be a member of CSTA and that its members (YOU) are what make it the GREAT organization it is today. But if anything about being on a board intrigues you, if you’re interested in seeing how the behind the scenes stuff works and you have the time to invest, the CSTA Board is a pretty amazing place!