Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy in Early Childhood Education: The Challenges and Opportunities

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy has become an emerging topic in digital literacy education research. However, it is still under-explored in early childhood education (ECE) since the AI curriculum for young children has just been designed in recent years. A scoping review was conducted to examine the thematic and content analysis of 16 empirical papers from 2016 to 2022. This scoping reviews evaluate, synthesize, and display 16 studies on AI literacy in early childhood education, including curriculum design, AI tools, pedagogical approaches, research designs, assessment methods, and findings. The discussion of the AI literacy implementation in ECE contributes to providing references for educators and researchers to design interventions to engage young children in AI learning. Further, we identified a set of challenges and opportunities of AI literacy. Several challenges included (1) lack of teachers' AI knowledge, skills, and confidence; (2) lack of curriculum design; and (3) lack of teaching guidelines. Although educators meet challenges at the beginning stage of developing AI instructional design for young children, AI learning could bring learning opportunities and foster young children's AI literacy in terms of AI concepts, practices and perspectives. We foresee that there will be a growing number of age-appropriate curriculum and tools for the ECE level. At the end, we also make some recommendations for future researchers and educators to improve AI literacy research and learning design in early childhood education.