Interpreting data visualizations is an essential skill in today's education, yet students often struggle with understanding unfamiliar formats. This study investigates how four learning materials - textbook, comic, video, and game - affect middle- and high school students' ability to interpret line charts, area charts, stacked area charts, and stream graphs. We conducted a comparative classroom study with 68 students, using pre- and post-tests, worksheet activities, and group discussions to assess learning outcomes and understanding. Our results show statistically significant improvement in students' understanding of stacked area charts and stream graphs, while no significant differences between the learning materials were found. This suggests that more factors than initially anticipated - such as engagement, motivation and active learning strategies - influence the learning outcome. The analysis of the worksheets revealed that while students could infer surface-level insights from charts, over 70% struggled to identify underlying patterns or relationships. Additionally, a common challenge across all learning materials was reading fatigue, which often led students to skim content, disengage, or misinterpret key information. These findings highlight the need for educational tools and approaches that foster deeper understanding of unfamiliar visualizations, reduce cognitive load, and encourage active engagement.

This Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper presents a novel educational project, aiming at the development and implementation of a professional, standardized, internationally accepted system for training and certifying teachers, school students and young people in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics. In recent years, AI and Robotics have become major topics with a huge impact not only on our everyday life but also on the working environment. Hence, sound knowledge about principles and concepts of AI and Robotics are key skills for the 21st century. Nonetheless, hardly any systematic approaches exist that focus on teaching AI/Robotics principles at K-12 level, addressing both teachers and students. In order to meet this challenge, the European Driving License for Robots and Intelligent Systems is under development. It is based on a number of previously implemented and evaluated projects and comprises teaching curricula and training modules for AI/Robotics, following a competency based, blended learning approach. Additionally, a certification system proves peoples' competencies acquired during the training. By applying this innovative approach - a standardized and widely recognized training and certification system for AI and Robotics at K-12 level for both teachers and students - we envision to foster AI/Robotics literacy on a broad basis.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress paper presents an innovative, scientifically evaluated Educational Robotics project aiming at teaching fundamental Robotics topics to gifted high school students. Robotics plays an increasingly important role in our life. The increased need for well-trained people underlines the importance of a systematic education in Robotics, from K-12 to university. In recent years, a number of Educational Robotics projects and initiatives have emerged, mainly focusing on introducing children and youth to Robotics, but without going into greater detail on fundamental Robotics concepts. In order to close the gap between these introductory Robotics courses for beginners at K-12 level and common Robotics university courses, the MINT-Robo project was developed. Based on previously implemented K-12 Robotics projects, it is designed around the central topic of autonomous mobile robots. Complex contents, usually taught at university level, are prepared for the project's target group. Following the principles of constructionism, the project comprises a variety of hands-on elements, applying a project-based learning approach. The first pilot course was implemented and evaluated in form of youth research week in summer 2018. First results indicate that the goal of imparting fundamental Robotics concepts to talented high school students was achieved.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important. Thus, sound knowledge about the principles of AI will be a crucial factor for future careers of young people as well as for the development of novel, innovative products. Addressing this challenge, we present an ambitious 3-year project focusing on developing and implementing a professional, internationally accepted, standardized training and certification system for AI which will also be recognized by the industry and educational institutions. The approach is based on already implemented and evaluated pilot projects in the area of AI education. The project’s main goal is to train and certify teachers and mentors as well as students and young people in basic and advanced AI topics, fostering AI literacy among this target audience.

Profound knowledge about Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become increasingly important for careers in science and engineering. Therefore an innovative educational project teaching fundamental concepts of AI at high school level will be presented in this paper. We developed an AI-course covering major topics (problem solving, search, planning, graphs, datastructures, automata, agent systems, machine learning) which comprises both theoretical and hands-on components. A pilot project was conducted and empirically evaluated. Results of the evaluation show that the participating pupils have become familiar with those concepts and the various topics addressed. Results and lessons learned from this project form the basis for further projects in different schools which intend to integrate AI in future secondary science education.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) already plays a major role in our daily life (e.g. intelligent household appliances like robotic vacuum cleaners or AI-based applications like Google Maps, Google Now, Siri, Cortana, ...). Sound knowledge about AI and the principles of computer science will be of vast importance for future careers in science and engineering. Looking towards the near future, jobs will largely be related to AI. In this context literacy in AI and computer science will become as important as classic literacy (reading/writing). By using an analogy with this process we developed a novel AI education concept aiming at fostering AI literacy. The concept comprises modules for different age groups on different educational levels. Fundamental AI/computer science topics addressed in each module are, amongst others, problem solving by search, sorting, graphs and data structures. We developed, conducted and evaluated four proof-of-concepts modules focusing on kindergarten/primary school as well as middle school, high school and university. Preliminary results of the pilot implementations indicate that the proposed AI education concept aiming at fostering AI literacy works.