EAGER: Data Science + Artificial Intelligence National PD Week: Equipping Educators and Students for Success in the Digital Frontier

The Computer Science Alliance and Data Science 4 Everyone (DS4E), in collaboration with aiEDU, Bootstrap, Introduction to Data Science (IDS), CourseKata, and Youcubed, will launch a multi-subject Data Science (DS) + Artificial Intelligence (AI) Professional Development (PD) Week for high school teachers. U.S. students must be prepared to compete in a global economy increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, big data, computing, and other emerging technology, collectively defined here as “the Digital Frontier.” Skill demands in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and energy management are increasingly data-centric as workers increasingly perform tasks in-tandem with AI and other digital tools. What are high-priority skills and teaching strategies to ensure students graduate prepared for an AI economy, and how can these be integrated across traditional school subjects, including but beyond K-12 Computer Science? The DS + AI National PD Week project will engage, train, and equip a cohort of “master teachers” to serve as national experts in these emerging topics, and investigate the strategies best suited to scale educator training and preparation across existing core school subjects to adapt to a fast-changing landscape. With AI’s potential to serve as a force-multiplier technology, students who are ready to customize AI-models for specific industry use-cases and research questions with domain-relevant digital data will unlock accelerated scientific progress. As other countries substantially increase investment in emerging technology training, this project will fulfill NSF’s mission by addressing critical U.S. workforce competitiveness challenges and population-wide talent gaps with international AI-rivals, ensuring long-term national security and a consistent edge-advantage in scientific advancement across domains. The project will define a vision for teaching “Digital Frontier Skills” by combining and refining curriculum design, training approaches, pedagogical strategies, and classroom techniques across school subjects. To do so, the project will (1) organize a multi-subject, in-person intensive training that will engage a) educators from around the country representing at least 20 states and b) multiple education research teams across technology-domains (AI, data science, computing) (2) develop and host a digital community for school-year implementation and strategy iteration (3) develop and test a novel, cross-state digital credit system for recognizing credit-hours in emerging technology education techniques and expertise, intended to unify Continuing Education Units (CEU) credits in areas of national need. Through mixed-methods survey and observational research, the project will investigate the factors and key barriers that enable existing K-12 high school educators in core school subjects to succeed in teaching digital frontier technology concepts. Finally, the project will support wide-reaching dissemination activities for “Digital Frontier Teaching Corps” members to distribute and scale strategies in their respective states. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.