Epistemic Insights as Design Principles for a Teaching-Learning Module on Artificial Intelligence

In a historical moment in which Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have become within everyone’s reach, science education needs to find new ways to foster “AI literacy.” Since the AI revolution is not only a matter of having introduced extremely performant tools but has been determining a radical change in how we conceive and produce knowledge, not only technical skills are needed but instruments to engage, cognitively, and culturally, with the epistemological challenges that this revolution poses. In this paper, we argue that epistemic insights can be introduced in AI teaching to highlight the differences between three paradigms: the imperative procedural, the declarative logic, and the machine learning based on neural networks (in particular, deep learning). To do this, we analyze a teaching-learning activity designed and implemented within a module on AI for upper secondary school students in which the game of tic-tac-toe is addressed from these three alternative perspectives. We show how the epistemic issues of opacity, uncertainty, and emergence, which the philosophical literature highlights as characterizing the novelty of deep learning with respect to other approaches, allow us to build the scaffolding for establishing a dialogue between the three different paradigms.