The artificial intelligence is storming the classrooms. Chatbots have become another everyday tool in university life and teachers are realizing something: all students submit the same work. But apart from how ‘Vago’s Corner‘ vitaminized, there are those who are pushing to introduce AI into the educational system from the same bases. And there China has an ambitious plan to stand out in the fierce global competition.
Its name is ‘AI + Education’, and it is supported by the Ministry of Education itself.
The problem. AI and machine learning They have been used as tools for years. When the current AI chatbotsmachine learning was responsible for analyzing tremendous amounts of data to learn ‘on the fly’, being a tool for many sectors. But it is clear that AI has boosted the entire sector, and in China ends to overcome an achievement.
The architect was Archon, an AI that uses a theorem search engine to transform informal proofs into fully verified projects. Its repository is a huge library maintained by a community that dumps hundreds of thousands of theorems and definitions, and it is the one that has completely autonomously solved an open problem proposed more than a decade ago. The only human intervention has consisted of downloading files behind paywalls, since they were the ones that Archon could not recover.
The solution. This case is just one example of the use of AI in China, a country that is promoting this technology as a way to achieve technological sovereignty in the complicated global scenario in which we find ourselves, which is going to integrate it into the earliest educational strata. Inside From China’s Long-Term Education Plan to 2035 (somewhat similar to the country’s five-year economic and technological development plan), is the ‘AI + Education’ action plan.
As detail in South China Morning Post, it is something presented by the Ministry of Education that seeks to integrate artificial intelligence into every stage of learning starting from primary education. It is the immediate response to similar plans for the assimilation of AI in education proposed by competitors such as Europe, Singapore and, above all, the United States, and the objective is clear: to increase literacy in artificial intelligence throughout the country as a pillar of future economic competitiveness.
Math, cone, tongue, AI. The architects of the plan argue that the skills necessary for the modern era must be redefined and “AI is forcing a systemic and fundamental review of education.” The intention is that, instead of fragmented local projects in which each one can go at one speed, there is a program regulated by the central government to consolidate AI platforms and what this implies at the level of computing power and networks. Let everyone go at the same speed, in short.
For this transition, teachers will be trained and required to have knowledge of AI and, as we say, it will be something that will go from the most basic level in schools (to feed curiosity and problem-solving skills in students) to university, so that graduates have better access to AI learning opportunities. That is, AI will be a core part of the education of a Chinese student from childhood to adulthood, so when any type of problem arises, they know how to use the tool to solve it.
AI study rooms. But even if it is now that the Government wants to introduce AI into the formal educational system, this is something that has been embedded in the education of young Chinese for some time. Not just Yale students They were going to use AI to find jobs, and in China it has been reported that there are about 50,000 AI “study rooms” across the country. To call them something.
These are cubicles in which there is a tablet that proposes tests and where no teaching is done, since the software on the tablets cannot explain the subject and they only function as “supervisors.” It’s like learning a subject by taking multiple choice exams and remembering which question you got right and wrong, but without having any idea why.
It is a lucrative educational technology business – valued at $43 billion – and it has already been reported that, to cope with the monotony of six hours in front of the tablet answering questions, children start playing classic games like Go. This system operates in a gray area because since 2021 China has not allowed for-profit tutoring to alleviate financial pressure on families, but since AI does not teach, this system operates in an unclear framework. And it is paid, of course.
Debate. Such has been the commotion in these AI study rooms that the same Ministry of Education that now seeks to make AI a core subject in education, has come out lecture to ban elementary school students from using AI tools to complete their assignments. AI should only be a supervised support tool, and it is something that also goes hand in hand with what teachers demand.
With the government proposal, what will be sought is not that students do their homework with AI tools, but that they know how to use them, what they are useful for and how to have this software as another tool at their disposal when developing. But what you want is one thing and what you achieve is another, because there is something that comes into play here: the situation of each family, and there are already those who warns that AI can widen the country’s social gap.
While in large cities where parents can have a higher level of education and, together with teachers, carry out good AI education work so that children know how to interact with it and even question the machine and its hallucinations, students in rural areas run the risk of being parked in these digital babysitting cubicles with easy answers while parents work.
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