Education in the AI era: a long-term classroom technology based on intelligent robotics

Abstract Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a major social impact in the coming years, affecting today’s professions and our daily routines. In the short-term, education is one of the most impacted areas. The autonomous decision making that can be achieved with tools based on AI implies that some of the traditional methodologies associated with the fundamentals of the learning process in students, must be reviewed. Consequently, the role of teachers in the classroom may change, as they will have to deal with such AI tools performing parts of their work, and with students making a common use of them. In this scope, the AI in Education (AIEd) community agrees on the key relevance of developing AI literacies to train teachers and students of all educational levels in the fundamentals of this new technological discipline, so they can understand how these tools based on AI work and pilot the adaptation in an informed way. This implies teaching students about the fundamentals of topics like perception, representation, reasoning, learning, and the impact of AI, with the aim of delivering a solid formation in this area. To support them, formal teaching and learning resources must be developed and tested with students, properly adapted to different educational levels. The main contribution of this proposal lies in the presentation of the Robobo Project, a technological tool based on intelligent robotics that supports such formal AI literacy training for a wide range of ages, from secondary school to higher education. The core part of this paper is focused on showing the possibilities the Robobo Project offers to teachers in a simple way, and how it can be adapted to different levels and skills, leading to a long-term educational proposal. Validation results that support the feasibility of this technology in the education about AI, obtained with students and teachers in different educational levels during a period of six years, are presented and discussed.