KI-Adventskalender: An Informal Learning Intervention for Data & AI Literacy

TL;DR

This paper presents KI-Adventskalender, a web-based extracurricular program with daily micro-challenges to improve data and AI literacy among secondary students, analyzing participation and engagement over two years.

Contribution

It introduces a novel didactic approach with micro-challenges for data and AI literacy and provides empirical insights from two annual implementations.

Findings

Participation increased substantially in 2025.

Over 75% of users who reached Day 12 completed the calendar.

Higher revision rates correlated with strong pass rates.

Abstract

Secondary school students increasingly encounter AI systems whose outputs depend on data quality, evaluation choices and modeling assumptions. To provide accessible entry points to these interconnected concepts, we developed KI-Adventskalender, a free web-based extracurricular initiative with 24 didactically curated, short, guided micro-challenges released daily in December, targeting data-centric competencies and socio-technical themes that shape how data are interpreted in practice. Drawing on two annual iterations, we report aggregate platform traces characterizing participation and task-level engagement. Participation increased substantially in 2025, but early attrition persists. Progression stabilized after midpoint: among users reaching Day 12 in 2025, more than 75% completed the calendar. Competence cluster performance shifted across years; higher revision rates co-occurred with strong pass rates, suggesting sustained engagement. We use these observations to motivate a next-step measurement agenda: tighter task instrumentation, embedded micro-assessments and mixed-method evaluation designs that can distinguish persistence from conceptual uptake, knowledge progression and durable learning outcomes.