Artificial intelligence (AI) has long become part of our everyday lives – including in education. So far, however, the focus in schools has primarily been on teaching knowledge about AI. Auguste Schulz, Managing Director of KI macht Schule gGmbH, says: »There are now many AI workshops for schools, but they often focus on rather short-lived topics, such as prompting strategies. The question of how AI can strategically and sustainably contribute to better learning is still too often overlooked.«
KI macht Schule – our new Grantee – addresses precisely this issue. The non-profit organisation develops practical and interactive educational programmes that empower students and teachers to use AI responsibly and critically. These include interactive workshops and training sessions offered digitally or directly at schools. Strengthening AI skills in schools is becoming increasingly important in order to counteract so-called »skill skipping« – the tendency to skip the acquisition of important skills such as research, arithmetic or the critical evaluation of information.
To make high-quality AI education more widely available, KI macht Schule is developing »kiwi.schule«, a digital, participatory and GDPR-compliant teaching platform. Teachers can access materials and guidance on how to meaningfully integrate AI into their lessons.
»We see two major opportunities for AI in schools: providing students with more individual support and identifying tasks that have a lasting positive impact on learning. Since individual education providers cannot develop such strategies on their own, our projects bring together research, school practice, perspectives from the federal states, and the development of software and educational media.«
From Educational Programmes to Systemic Change
KI macht Schule was founded in 2019 by scholarship holders of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Today, the organisation consists of a full-time team and a network of more than 120 volunteer AI experts, teachers and educationalists. For seven years, they have been bringing educational formats about and with AI to schools across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
KI macht Schule is currently developing the Adaptive Intelligent System (AIS) together with a consortium of partner organisations. This open, AI-supported infrastructure for schools is being developed on behalf of the German federal states and implemented by the Institute for Film and Image in Science and Education (FWU). The aim is to use AI to support individual learning pathways and help teachers work with students with a wide range of learning needs. KI macht Schule is responsible for the content design and for connecting key stakeholders in education.
The open, research-oriented AIS ecosystem has the potential to bring about positive, long-term change in the education landscape. The Schöpflin Foundation is therefore supporting KI macht Schule through an Innovation Fund. It provides flexible seed funding, enabling the non-profit organisation to contribute to the development of further large-scale projects beyond the current project phase and to apply for relevant calls for proposals.
Das offene und forschungsnahe Ökosystem AIS hat das Potenzial, die Bildungslandschaft langfristig positiv zu verändern. Die Schöpflin Stiftung unterstützt KI macht Schule daher mit einem Innovationsfund. Er dient der flexiblen Anschubfinanzierung. So kann die gemeinnützige Organisation über die aktuelle Projektphase hinaus an der Entwicklung weiterer Großprojekte mitarbeiten und sich auf entsprechende Ausschreibungen bewerben.
More information about the new Grantee partnership is available here.