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In Dalmine the students of Itis Marconi learn Dante by teaching him artificial intelligence. The literature teacher of the Automation section, Laura Ragaldo, entrusted the children, in groups, with six cantos from Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, asking them to analyze characters, stories, rhetorical figures, and then transmit the lesson to a robot equipped with TO THE. In the end the teacher questions the robot to evaluate the students’ preparation: “They become protagonists of their learning and don’t even realize they have studied”, summarizes the teacher. Meanwhile they also learned how the AI thinks.
In Campobasso Rossella Gianfagna had invested in Furhat with the high school language laboratory in mind. But the “grown-ups” proved to be indifferent and therefore she saw fit to reuse that social robot armed with artificial intelligence in primary school: for children it is a companion who welcomes them every day in class and transforms into a support for the teacher for the creation of texts for teaching or for group activities in the classroom: “It’s a kind of co-presence for children, who thus learn to interact with artificial intelligence right away,” he explains. At the Mattarella school in Modena, AI materialized in Lucy, a dynamic curriculum for lower secondary schools to educate young people “to understand and use AI technologies and to interpret data in a conscious and responsible manner”. Even the world of education is facing the innovation of generative AI, a technology that today’s children will certainly have to deal with: the Institute for the Future estimates that 85% of the places that will exist in 2030 today will not exist. Much of this will have to do with artificial intelligence.
Double brain
But not all learning has to be limited to technology. Thus in Bergamo 1,800 middle school children were introduced to the theater during school hours with a final performance that involved the squares of the entire city reciting texts created by themselves: «They became protagonists, being visible for once in the eyes of the adults – recalls Maria Grazia Panigada, curator of the “It will rain beauty” project -. A new language such as theatrical language is transformed into emotion, giving life to areas in which children find their own space for expression and fulfilment.” In the nascent era of artificial intelligence it is no coincidence that in schools we talk about emotion and involvement, about putting the person back at the centre, protagonist of the learning process, precisely at the moment in which children seem immersed in a double reality, with daily life, outside the school walls, as opposed to that at school, as if children should have a “double brain”. Perhaps today more than ever “children have a higher cognitive capacity than adults, but the speed of use of the content – 30 seconds on average – changes the methods of dialogue, requiring a very rapid entry point to be exploited for their involvement” , underlines Roberto Frasca, creative director of Ett which is expanding into educational formats.
Keyword: «involvement»
Involvement therefore becomes the keystone: «In a growing trend of returning to the physical classroom, both for school and for scholastic training, the omnichannel approach capable of integrating diversified training solutions, also in a gamification logic, allows to simplify the learners’ experience, making it increasingly immediate, intuitive and fast”, confirms Martina Mauri, director of the Edtech Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan. The challenge is to coordinate the quality of the content with the speed of use, but also the speed with which people are asked to update their skills.
Balance between technologies, languages and channels
From this point of view, artificial intelligence offers the possibility of enhancing the role of digital as a powerful enabler of educational processes: to the flexibility of delivery and use by integrating spaces and times, to involvement through innovative methods close to the students’ reality, to the potential of inclusiveness for students with special needs, to the possibility of providing training when needed, especially in the workplace, is added the great opportunity to personalize the students’ educational path in a multidisciplinary logic thanks to agile, fast and easy-to-use contents and distribute, making them co-authors of their educational process. It is true that so far there has been a lack of empirical evidence of the positive impact of technologies on learning, but now it is a question of finding the right balance between technologies, languages and channels.