Become an AI Tool User or Builder: Designing Introductory AI Courses in a Liberal Arts Context

Teaching AI ethics to computing students by embedding ethics lessons into AI classes is a growing trend. Although designing projects and assignments to explore AI's ethical dimensions is common, creating a balance between technical and ethical concepts for students with diverse backgrounds poses a challenge. This paper introduces an introductory AI curriculum for a liberal arts context for students to gain hands-on experience and critical thinking skills, using co-designed courses focusing on Computer Vision and on Natural Language Processing. Employing programming, team projects, readings, and discussions as interventions, we assessed the curriculum's impact on students’ sense of belonging, perception of learning environment, self-efficacy, AI ethics awareness, interest in AI career, perception of AI's usefulness, and growth mindset. Our results show increased belonging, self-efficacy, AI ethics awareness, and improved perception of the learning environment. This work indicates the efficacy of technically-grounded ethical AI introduction for an interdisciplinary audience in the liberal arts domain, thereby calling for further exploration on this topic.