Cited by 130Teaching and Learning ProgrammingEducational Robotics and EngineeringArtificial Intelligence in Education

Visual tools for teaching machine learning in K-12: A ten-year systematic mapping

Open access
Gresse von Wangenheim, Christiane, Hauck, Jean C. R., Pacheco, Fernando S., Bertonceli Bueno, Matheus F.·2021·Education and Information Technologies

Abstract

Teaching Machine Learning in school helps students to be better prepared for a society rapidly changing due to the impact of Artificial Intelligence. This requires age-appropriate tools that allow students to develop a comprehensive understanding of Machine Learning in order to become creators of smart solutions. Following the trend of visual languages for introducing algorithms and programming in K-12, we present a ten-year systematic mapping of emerging visual tools that support the teaching of Machine Learning at this educational stage and analyze the tools concerning their educational characteristics, support for the development of ML models as well as their deployment and how the tools have been developed and evaluated. As a result, we encountered 16 tools targeting students mostly as part of short duration extracurricular activities. Tools mainly support the interactive development of ML models for image recognition tasks using supervised learning covering basic steps of the ML process. Being integrated into popular block-based programming languages (primarily Scratch and App Inventor), they also support the deployment of the created ML models as part of games or mobile applications. Findings indicate that the tools can effectively leverage students' understanding of Machine Learning, however, further studies regarding the design of the tools concerning educational aspects are required to better guide their effective adoption in schools and their enhancement to support the learning process more comprehensively.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s10639-021-10570-8

Cites

85 of 85 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Some AI tools are integrated into block-based programming languages (such as Scratch or App Inventor), enabling the deployment of ML models built into games or mobile applications.

    “Some of them are integrated into block-based programming languages (such as Scratch or App Inventor) (Toivonen et al., 2020; von Wangenheim et al., 2021), enabling the deployment of the ML models built into games or mobile applications.”

    From AI literacy in K-12: a systematic literature review (2023) · cites this paper as von Wangenheim et al., 2021

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Kahn, K. M., Megasari, R., Piantari, E., Junaeti, E. (2018). AI Programming by Children Using Snap! Block Programming in a Developing Country. In Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Leeds, UK, 2018.
  2. Mitchell TM Machine Learning 1997 McGraw-Hill Education. New York.
  3. Tang, D., Utsumi, Y., Lao, N. (2019). PIC: A Personal Image Classification Webtool for High School Students. In Proceedings of the IJCAI EduAI Workshop, Macao, China.
  4. Tang, D. (2019). Empowering Novices to Understand and Use Machine Learning With Personalized Image Classification Models, Intuitive Analysis Tools, and MIT App Inventor, M.Eng thesis, MIT, Cambridge, USA.
  5. Touretzky, D. S. et al. (2019a). K-12 Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence: What Students Should Know. In Proc. of the ISTE Conference, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
  6. Van Brummelen, J. Shen, J. H., Patton, E. W. (2019). The Popstar, the Poet, and the Grinch: Relating Artificial Intelligence to the Computational Thinking Framework with Block-based Coding. In Proceedings of the Int. Conference on Computational Thinking, Hong Kong, China.
  7. Weintrop, D., Holbert, N., Tissenbaum, M. (2020). Considering Alternative Endpoints: An Exploration in the Space of Computing Educations. In Proceedings of the Constructionism Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2020.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Gresse von Wangenheim, C., Hauck, J. C. R., Pacheco, F. S., & Bertonceli Bueno, M. F.
Affiliations
  • Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (BR)
  • Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Santa Catarina (BR)
Venue
Education and Information Technologies
Published
2021-05-01
Volume
26
Issue
5
Pages
5733-5778
ISSN
  • 1360-2357 (ISSN-L)
  • 1573-7608
OpenAlex
W3157682111
Cited by
130
References
85
Citations by year
2026: 22 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 3
FWCI
17.56
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Education and Information Technologies (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (303674/2019-9)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Teaching and Learning Programming
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Educational Robotics and Engineering
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Artificial Intelligence in Education
Keywords
machine learning education, K-12 education, visual programming tools, block-based programming, Scratch, MIT App Inventor, image recognition, supervised learning, extracurricular activities, mobile application deployment, AI literacy, educational tool evaluation

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review