The multiplier event in Germany took place on July 16th 2022 on the research campus Garching next to Munich. With kind support of Prof. Stephan Günnemann, the director of the Munich Data Science Institute (Technical University of Munich), we were able to use their thematically fitting premises for the workshop. The workshop was open to the public and advertised to all pedagogy students of the two Munich universities as well as to multiple vocational schools in the Munich area. In addition, we created a website for registration with detailed information about the event (https://sites.google.com/view/workshop-ki/startseite).
In total, it was attended by 4 vocational school teachers, 2 pedagogy students and one PhD student in neuroscience. In the course, we presented our developed lesson material, teaching the participants about the foundations of AI research, the mathematics of machine learning and economic and ethical impacts of autonomous driving. Afterwards, we discussed with the teachers the best practices to introduce our materials in classes with diverse students. The highlight of the workshop was the hands-on session with the Jetbot mobile robots. The participants split in groups and had to use their acquired knowledge about machine learning, computer vision and autonomous driving to teach the robots to avoid collisions and to follow a lane which we placed on the floor of the venue.
The participants were highly motivated and enthusiastically collaborated on this task, aiming at recording diverse and robust datasets for training and fine-tuning control parameters of the mobile robots. In the end, all groups successfully accomplished the tasks, thus demonstrating the competences they gained in our course. Several of the teachers voiced their intention to use the lesson materials that we had shown them in their own classrooms.
Since it was a full-day event, running from 10am to 4.30pm (some teachers stayed even longer to continue experimenting with the AI-powered robot and to discuss with us about AI education), we provided goods from a bakery, coffee and other beverages and lunch to the participants.
After the event, we published a blogpost on the event (https://ki-macht-schule.de/blog/multiplierevent.html) and several social media posts.