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AI as a tool to train imagination
In a landscape where the ban on the use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and the like at school is being debated, with fears that they will be used in homework or tests and thus undermine students’ learning, there are projects, programmes and institutes that are already exploiting new technologies to stimulate more critical thinking in the classroom.
How can artificial intelligence help in schools? Artificial intelligence can be used in various ways in education and school teaching:
- can be used to personalise learning, adapting the pace, level of difficulty and teaching style to the individual needs and abilities of students;
- can be used to create virtual tutors who provide support and feedback to individual students in a similar way to a real teacher;
- can be used to analyse students’ data and predict their future performance, enabling teachers to intervene early to avoid failures;
- it can be used to automatically generate teaching materials, such as quizzes, exercises and videos, to provide additional support to teachers and make students autonomous in the learning process;
- finally, an evolving field of application is its use to automate assessments.
To sum up, virtuous cases of the use of artificial intelligence in education do exist, and recounting them can be useful in deconstructing the most popular narratives around the adoption of this technology today.
A practical example of the application of artificial intelligence for educational purposes can be the combination of machine learning algorithms to analyse large amounts of data, make them available according to grids and behaviours learned by and from users, and finally use the learned information to stimulate the production of new content in a responsible and conscious manner.
This type of application concerns recommendation systems: information filtering software that uses artificial intelligence to transform data into predictive algorithms. They have long been applied in various sectors, particularly in streaming and e-commerce services. They perform the important function of automatically filtering and customising information, enabling the user to cope with the data overload they are subjected to on a daily basis. The user is helped in the decision-making process based on the choices they have previously made.
What if the recommender system recommended good sustainability practices?
Thus was born the Green Learning RS, a tool developed to browse the archive of sustainability stories about italian best practices of chankemaking processes, and discover new experiences on environmental, economic, social, technological sustainability.
Workshops with schools in Ancona and Bassano
The Green Learning RS was used in the AI FOR GREEN LEARNING training path, a cycle of four meetings in four high schools in Bassano del Grappa (Liceo Ginnasio Statale G. B. Brocchi e Istituto Istruzione Superiore A. Scotton) and Ancona (Istituto di Istruzione Superiore L. Cambi – D. Serrani e Istituto di Istruzione Superiore “Savoia Benincasa”) for a total of 50 hours of training and 142 participant students, held between March and May 2023.
The AI FOR GREEN LEARNING workshops are part of the MACHINES FOR GOOD project, conceived and coordinated by Sineglossa, in collaboration with Baltan Laboratories (The Netherlands), Ohme (Belgium), FZC – Fundacion Zaragoza Ciudad de Conocimiento (Spain), co-funded by the European Union within the CERV programme.
The workshops have focused on the theme of desirable future, with the aim of raising awareness in participants on the themes of sustainability, recycling, misinformation, providing tools to imagine desirable future scenarios. In particular, the activities were designed with the aim of increasing the knowledge and awareness of the new generations on the topic of sustainability in relation to the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).
To involve the class actively, the argument was presented through two practical and interactive activities with the objective of encouraging an active reflection on how much sustainability is - or is not - part of their lives:
Spatial map: students place themselves in space according to the level of sustainability present in their lives (from "a lot" to "not at all"), and then reflect together on the reasons for their answers.
Brainstorming: each participant writes his or her idea of sustainability on a post-it note, and the answers are commented on and grouped together, to obtain a mapping on the meaning of the word "sustainability" according to the teenagers' perceptions.
During the workshop an Artificial Intelligence tool has been used for:
- Actively engage and motivate the students in civic engagement practices;
- Introducing the sustainability theme in an interactive and innovative way, utilising the growing interest in a current theme (AI);
- Raising awareness in tech for good (i.e. using AI beyond utilitarianism), showing the usage in digital journalism;
Through the GREEN LEARNING Recommender system, developed specifically for the training course by the Marche Polytechnic University, AI turns into a tool for exploring good sustainability practices implemented in Italy.
The RS recommends newspaper articles in a customised manner on the basis of a series of choices made by the user: first a Sustainable Development Goal is selected, then a theme related to that SDG, and finally stories can be filtered through a hashtag that identifies further declinations of that theme.
In the second module of the workshop, students have the opportunity to experience the production of journalistic content, exploring their creative side. Guided by a professional storyteller, the students, divided into groups, have:
- identified a sustainability story in their city or region;
- Interviewed one or more representatives of local good practice;
- wrote a newspaper article on the story collected.
The students developed awareness on the topic of sustainability through the practical application on their own territory of the concepts explored at the theoretical level - learning by doing - and the creative elaboration - storytelling - of the contents discovered during the exploration.
The final output of the training course are the newspaper articles written by the students. Having had complete freedom in choosing the topic to be told, the stories contained in the articles represent a collective and participatory writing of the future scenarios desired by the new generations, describing the most important sustainability experiences according to their perception of reality.
Project results
Who was involved?
Overall, 142 high school students between the ages of 14 and 19, with a majority between the ages of 17 and 19 (84 participants, or 59% of the total).
Both the interest and the level of awareness of the participants with regard to the topic of sustainability seem to be quite high: almost 80% of them found the subject matter interesting/interesting and almost all of them adopt sustainable behaviour.
The most practised form of sustainability – as well as the most important for those who do not habitually practise sustainable behaviour – is attention to resource waste.
Beyond what teenagers habitually do, what form of sustainability do they consider fundamental and necessary for the future of the planet?
What sustainable behaviour do you practise?
Which form of sustainability is most important for the future of the planet?
