Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School

Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School Potential contemporary themes towards development of an informatics curriculum January 2023 by Michael E. Caspersen (Chair) Ira Diethelm Judith Gal-Ezer Andrew McGettrick Enrico Nardelli Don Passey Branislav Rovan Mary Webb - ii - Executive Summary The Informatics Reference Framework for School provides a high level and robust set of core topic areas that provide a framework for specifying in curricula the concepts, principles and practices of informatics. This document is a supplement to the Informatics Reference Framework for School. The intention is to support the interpretation of the Informatics Reference Framework in the context of recent innovations in informatics so that curriculum designers are encouraged to address contemporary themes of informatics and issues arising to help to match the curriculum to the interest of learners. Specifically, the focus is on the themes that are highlighted in bold italics in Section 4.4 of the Informatics Reference Framework for School. These themes are ‘opened up’ for attention in the current document as the basis for further development, in such a way that the concept of a framework is retained, although learning outcomes and aspirations are less formally addressed. January 2023 - iii - Table of Contents 1. Data science 4 2. Programming languages 4 3. Artificial intelligence 5 4. Machine learning 6 5. Computer graphics 7 6. Virtual reality 8 7. Augmented reality 8 8. Social networks 9 9. Automated decision making 10 10. Robotics 11 Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 4 - 1. Data science There is increasing recognition of the role that data can have in informing decision making and guiding advances leading to important innovation in areas such as health, the natural sciences and business intelligence as well as education. The identification and gathering of relevant data as well as the utilisation and processing of those data are important aspects of the subject of data science. Data can take various forms including text, multimedia (sound, video, etc.) and sensor data collected, for example, through Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Digital devices can be used to collect data both for real-time analysis (e.g. health monitoring) and for retrospective analysis (e.g. for business intelligence for governments and/or industry). It is important to ensure the quality of collected data including its relevance; often those data should be carefully protected and used with caution. Data about individuals as well as data about the world now form a routine part of life and can influence how people live. Collection and the use of personal data about individuals should always respect human rights. The analysis of well-targeted data, whether just visualising them using such mechanisms as charts or graphs or using them to provide virtual reality scenarios, can yield new insights or sometimes improved performances in many areas including business, education or the medical field. Important developments have been made recently in utilising vast amounts of data (“big data”) to fuel advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics. Generally, there are important ethical, legal and sustainability issues associated with the collection and use of data with security, privacy and confidentiality often being prime concerns. Training of big artificial intelligence models, for instance, can require computing power and processing time that involves vast resources in terms of cost, energy, etc. These various considerations need to be included in a contemporary view of informatics education. The many aspects include: data collection, cleansing data to remove extraneous detail, data quality including attention to such matters as bias, confidentiality, visualisation of data, structuring data and accessing data. Even from an early age, pupils ought to be encouraged to address issues associated with high quality data and be engaged in relevant innovative practical activity. Suitable collections of data, also country-specific, can typically be found on the Internet. 2. Programming languages Programming languages have been developed to facilitate the development and understanding of programs to be executed reliably on computers. Over the years, the family of programming languages has grown in number and in sophistication. There is now an expectation that languages should be easy to understand, have a desirable level of expressive power, and should support the identification of errors as far as possible. Languages for more advanced programming should have libraries that Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 5 - support the development of a range of software, e.g. for topics such as graphics, mathematics, concurrency, and data science. Languages are typically described using syntax and semantics. The syntactical rules resemble the rules of grammar in natural language and the semantics explain the meaning of syntactically correct programs. To be executed, programs expressed in these languages are translated into machine code (or virtual machine code) by a compiler or interpreter. The initial phases of the compilation or interpreting process involve checking that the program is syntactically sound and, if not, then errors are highlighted. Some languages have been developed for pupils of all ages. For instance, for younger pupils, turtle graphics are attractive and form an element of the LOGO language. The language Scratch is a block-based visual language and typically regarded as being suitable for young children. Over time, languages were developed to support various paradigms of problem solving: procedural, functional, logical and object-oriented paradigms. More recent languages have been developed to support particular needs. Programming should form part of informatics education for all pupils. Efforts by teachers to ensure that programming is enjoyable enhance pupil engagement, and the creative element should be highlighted whenever possible. 3. Artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is about building “intelligent” systems. This process is to be interpreted as building systems that mimic certain aspects of human cognitive skills. Much of the history of AI has been devoted to the exploitation of logic to make deductions and inferences from known information. But recent major advances have occurred through developments in machine learning. This has resulted in systems that, for instance, can advise, control, reason, deduce, make certain decisions, recognise objects, recognise speech, recognise handwriting, process language and can “learn” by being trained or by building their own model that is consistent with a given dataset. In many walks of life, artificial intelligence is now seen as a field of research and development that will significantly transform many aspects of the economy as well as daily lives. From this perspective, it is desirable that a study of informatics should acquaint pupils with these developments but especially as they may affect their future. Exploring and discussing these developments will inspire pupils and motivate them to examine how to create a better society. Behaviour regarded as ‘intelligent’ gives rise to the development of systems that can act autonomously or can augment human capability. These include autonomous vehicles for transport including space travel, personal assistants, recommender systems, as well as Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 6 - developments in industry, education and robotics. Understanding their capabilities opens up discussion about many social issues including the future of work. In all cases, the impact and associated ethical concerns merit special attention. From an educational perspective, tasks for pupils might include identifying instances of intelligent behaviour and explaining relevant social and ethical issues, developing simple AI systems, drawing comparisons between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, and suggesting they can be mutually supportive. 4. Machine learning Recent advances in machine learning enable systems to identify, by various means, features and patterns in large sets of unstructured real-life data. These developments - enabled by better algorithms, improved hardware and ever larger collections of digital data - have made it possible to automate an extraordinary range of tasks by enabling computers to play an increasingly decisive role in drawing conclusions and taking action on the basis of data. Thus it is important for everyone to develop insight into the nature of machine learning; undoubtedly, young pupils can engage in practical activities using simple data-driven algorithms of the type that drive machine learning. There are numerous approaches to implementing machine learning systems; many are based on exposing them to large sets of examples and using some form of “reward” for building appropriate models. This process of “learning” can happen in either an online setting or an offline setting. In the former, the system is developed offline and launched into a live setting only when it has been tried, tested and checked for quality. In an online setting, the systems are still developed in an offline setting but once deployed they continue to enhance their capability through a “learning” process. Given that the outcome of these systems are entirely dependent on the data they have examined, the quality and reliability of those data are of the utmost importance. It is important to avoid data with particular characteristics (e.g., unconscious bias), or data that lead to discrimination or injustice. From an educational perspective, in recent years, a number of environments have been developed to enable people, including young pupils, to begin to explore machine learning and thus to develop understanding of its nature, capabilities, and limitations; see, for example, https://code.org/oceans. It will be important for curriculum developers as well as teachers to identify suitable resources in their own contexts in order to enable pupils to develop their understanding of concepts of machine learning (e.g., features and their extraction, unsupervised or supervised learning) through practical activities. Moreover, great attention should be paid to the fact that the particular way these systems are built makes their testing and verification highly challenging and exposes them to the so-called “adversarial approaches”, where clever modifications to data presented to the systems leads them to derive wrong conclusions or decisions. In some cases, even altering the sequence in Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 7 - which data are examined during the “learning” phase can produce systems making different decisions. All pupils might be expected to recognise that the growing transfer of judgement from human beings to machines merits continued attention and includes the human computer interface issues associated with cooperation between humans and machines. 5. Computer graphics Visual rendition of program interfaces is more ubiquitous nowadays and is of considerable interest to pupils; they are used to interact with smart devices where graphics are widely used. Therefore, it is important to provide some element of knowledge of the fundamental issues related to this theme. For pupils of an appropriate age, the basic approaches to image formation (vector and raster) and colour modelling (additive and subtractive) are interesting enough, can be treated at a level they can understand from their existing knowledge base, and may be well anchored to traditional artistic drawing activities. Going forward, and again with the advantage of making reference to what pupils do in manual drawing activities (i.e., drawing with the use of perspective), problems related to the projection of 3-D scenes on a 2-D surface can be addressed. Also interesting and suitable to a treatment with various levels of complexity, is the “anti-aliasing” technique to improve the visual aspects of texts and shapes. When pupils develop higher levels of understanding and application, the theme can benefit from a background in geometry and aspects of physics, e.g. to understand how light travels, is reflected and passes through certain matter, how shadows occur, how objects behave after collision, and so on. In addition, the issue of graphical manipulations and their relations with algebraic transformations offers a lot of possibilities for discussing what happens every second in modern games. Programming simulations would tend to be accessible only to those in the later years of their school education and, most likely, to those who have followed a scientific route, the reason being that supporting knowledge tends to be taught at that later stage of education. Here, there are clear relations with simulation activities and a natural possibility of referring to other scientific phenomena. Once a working knowledge of basic aspects has been gained, pupils should be introduced to the graphical facilities in programming languages with attention being given to libraries to support graphics development and the use of these. Pupils at the later stages of their secondary education might be expected to demonstrate the applicability of graphics libraries in support of a project. Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 8 - 6. Virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is about having a simulated environment in which a user can feel immersed and is able to interact with the environment and/or with others within the environment. The simulated environment is computer generated and may model either the real or an imaginary world. Ideally, the environment should have a 'natural' feel, so that users do feel they are present in a natural environment. Thus, VR environments are significantly different from more traditional applications and learners should gain understanding of their advantages and challenges. There is an ever-expanding range of important areas of applications of VR including: medicine and healthcare, navigation, education and training, exploring buildings and geographical locations, as well, of course, games and entertainment. There are particular benefits when the simulated environment reflects a potentially dangerous or sensitive situation, e.g. life-threatening surgery or flight simulator, where a sudden or frightening situation may provoke a considerable physical reaction in the user and monitoring of that may be desirable. There are both ethical and wellbeing/ergonomic issues in the development of virtual reality applications, e.g. games that make the user perform activities that are completely unethical in the real world. Through experience of using VR systems, pupils should be expected to identify their benefits but also their limitations in particular application areas. Also, pupils should be able to identify situations that would benefit from the deployment of VR technology providing justification, and suggest materials that might be utilised in the creation of a system. Pupils can learn aspects of informatics, including programming, by working collaboratively within an immersive environment, thus potentially being more motivated. Through these experiences, they can also discuss and gain understanding of aspects of human computer interaction and the design of different types of interfaces. 7. Augmented reality Whereas virtual reality involves the creation of a wholly virtual world, augmented reality is about enhancing the real world with live updated layers of digital content aligned to the physical environment. It involves the creation of an environment in which objects of the real world are augmented or overlain or enhanced by digital objects as if they existed in the same (mixed) space. Augmented reality is based on camera technology and computer vision mounted in the environment. Typically, the aim is to experience the real world but at the same time to draw attention to specific visual qualities, aspects of behaviour or performance, features or characteristics, e.g. to see a piece of new furniture or a kitchen design in your own home before you buy it, to see a working set of instructions on how to assemble or dismantle industrial products to be serviced, to view head-up displays used for navigation or, in a Building on the Informatics Reference Framework for School _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ - 9 - healthcare setting, pointing to part of the human body to reveal details that had been gathered via a scan. It is expected that applications of augmented reality will grow considerably in terms of frequency and impact, the latter being driven in part by advances in technology. Through a disciplined approach in critically reviewing instances of augmented reality, pupils should be able to identify and describe additional applications, justifying them in terms of possible benefit and impact and to modify systems towards new applications. 8. Social networks The term social media (or social networks) refers to a collection of Internet-based systems or networks that utilise the ubiquitous presence of the Internet in every digital device to facilitate social interaction between people. There are many such systems, but they tend to be characterised by the ability to smoothly establish connections between people, making it easier to communicate (also in groups), to instant message, to share video, pictures, information and photographs. The benefits of these systems include establishing valuable networks and sharing ideas, developing new interests, learning new concepts, and being entertained. Privacy is a fundamentally important concern in the context of social media. In their enthusiasm, there is a temptation for users, often especially young people, to include a great deal of information in their profiles including photographs and their views on particular topics; they may later come to regret this and fail to understand that all these data can be used to inadvertently nudge them to always repeat the same kind of choices. A second concern is the ad-driven business model of many of these platforms, where the goal is to increase as much as possible the time of engagement with the platform itself. This increased exposure to ads tends to reinforce one’s own view and to create the so-called “echo chambers”; in these “echo chambers”, the diversity of opinions users are exposed to is largely reduced, resulting in highly polarised communities and reduced critical thinking abilities. Finally, given their incredible potential of amplification of shared information, coupled with the detachment given by interacting through a digital device, the third important point concerns pupils’ needs to be aware that social media platforms can easily become a means of discrimination, bullying and exclusion. These problems are particularly critical for young people whose identities are undergoing rapid development. They need to know of potential ways of addressing these issues. From an educational perspective, young people tend to be drawn to social media. Consequently, this is likely to be a topic of considerable interest to them. However, while they