Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Coding and Chess for Primary Schools

The main objective was to deliver a course to Italian and Swedish pupils that would have had as main subject the learning of chess and the correlation with coding and AI. With our project, to rea...

The main objective was to deliver a course to Italian and Swedish pupils that would have had as main subject the learning of chess and the correlation with coding and AI. With our project, to reach the main objective, we wanted 1. to develop an "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Coding and Chess for Primary School" course. 2. to put teachers in the best possible position to effectively deliver the course through a tutor-assisted self-training initiative 3. to experiment with the course in four fifth-grade classes, three in Italy and two in Sweden. 4. to conduct an initial rough evaluation of the impact of the course itself. 5. to imagine and project a moment of dissemination and presentation of the results, both in Italy and in Sweden, in order to engage parents and teachers and collect the final results of the pilot experiment with chess, AI and Coding.

Our project was very rich in actions and activities, and well structured during the project design phase, and we are very proud to confirm that every activity we had written down was implemented. Due to the date of communication of the approval of the contribution, delivered after the ideal start of the activities, we had to change the timeline and ask for a delay, kindly accepted. Briefly, after the kick off meeting and when teachers had been trained by the Chess experts and with the help of CSER Australia program, the project started with the delivery and implementation of the course to the pupils. In January 2024 the two final moments took place in Italy and in Sweden: those were moments useful for the teachers and above all for the kids, because they were able to try themselves in Chess tournaments and coding demonstrations. Furthermore, parents, teachers and the experts of the Project had in those moments the opportunity to be instructed about the results of the monitoring process by Ilaria.

The concrete outputs that we were supposed to produce were: first of all, as the main product, the development and pilot experimentation of a course for the pupils. In order to be developed in four elementary school classes the teachers needed training, so the first output produced was Teachers' tutor-assisted self-training manual. We have collected memories and videos about the two disseminations events in Italy and Swedish, to share the experiences between each country and with the rest of Europe. The last output is the final report, by the monitor Ilaria Piccozzi, that represents the first approximate evaluation of the impact of course delivery concluded through adequate monitoring. All the outputs have been uploaded to the results platform of Erasmus+.