  Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been adopted in a wide range of domains.
This shows the imperative need to develop means to endow common people with a
minimum understanding of what AI means. Combining visual programming and WiSARD
weightless artificial neural networks, this article presents a new methodology,
AI from concrete to abstract (AIcon2abs), to enable general people (including
children) to achieve this goal. The main strategy adopted by is to promote a
demystification of artificial intelligence via practical activities related to
the development of learning machines, as well as through the observation of
their learning process. Thus, it is possible to provide subjects with skills
that contributes to making them insightful actors in debates and decisions
involving the adoption of artificial intelligence mechanisms. Currently,
existing approaches to the teaching of basic AI concepts through programming
treat machine intelligence as an external element/module. After being trained,
that external module is coupled to the main application being developed by the
learners. In the methodology herein presented, both training and classification
tasks are blocks that compose the main program, just as the other programming
constructs. As a beneficial side effect of AIcon2abs, the difference between a
program capable of learning from data and a conventional computer program
becomes more evident. In addition, the simplicity of the WiSARD weightless
artificial neural network model enables easy visualization and understanding of
training and classification tasks internal realization.
