France × Hong Kong: learning robots open the AI "black box" to schoolchildren

By Learning Robots - November 20, 2025

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What if, as early as CM2 or 6ᵉ, your students trained a real AI themselves?

What if, as early as CM2 or 6ᵉ, your students could literally take control of an artificial intelligence, feed it data, watch it learn in real time, organize a real autonomous robot race in the classroom... and above all understand, step by step, what's really going on inside the famous AI "black box"?

This is exactly the gentle revolution that AlphAI proposes.

AlphAI: the robot that opens the black box

‍Designedat the CNRS by Thomas Deneux (research engineer at NeuroPSI - Université Paris-Saclay) and marketed by his French startup Learning Robots, AlphAI is a small rolling robot with a unique interface: we see live the data coming in, the neuronal connections being created, the error curve going down and the decisions being made every millisecond.No more magic: children become real little AI engineers.

Love at first sight 8,000 km from Paris

‍2023, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie. Professor Siu-Cheung Kong, head of Hong Kong's major national " AI Literacy " program and director of a renowned team at the Education University of Hong Kong, tests AlphAI for the first time.His reaction? Total enthusiasm. For him, it's the perfect tool for teaching the inner workings of AI in elementary and junior high schools.

Birth of a scientific collaboration between France and Hong Kong

‍TheHong Kong team then built a complete program of 7 educational sessions (nearly 100 pages of ultra-detailed and illustrated guides) entirely around AlphAI and its "open the black box" philosophy.Deployment starts from 2024-2025 in Hong Kong with a rigorous scientific protocol.

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How things are going in Hong Kong (already two cycles!)

• A full day of training where teachers play students themselves
• 7 classroom sessions with robots
• Anonymous before-and-after questionnaires (validated by RGPD and ethics committees) completed by students and teachers
• Cross-analysis by CNRS Paris-Saclay and the Education University of Hong Kong

The results of the first cycle are excellent → an improved second cycle started in October 2025.

2025: Hong Kong team tests program in France

‍April2025: the delegation comes specially to Paris for test classes (Massy and Clichy-sous-Bois).Result: a few adjustments to the pace, but the core of the program passes everywhere.

2025-2026: Grenoble becomes France's leading laboratory

‍TheGrenoble Academy, supported by Réseau Canopé and DRANE PACA, officially launches the experiment.

• November 12, 2025 → training of the first volunteer teachers
• All school year → roll-out of 7 sessions and scientific evaluation
• Objective: to compare the progress of French and Hong Kong students.

Why it matters

AI is not a technology like any other. Understanding how it really learns (data, k-nearest-neighbors, neural networks, reinforcement learning, the role of reward...) makes it possible to :

• develop a genuine scientific and technical culture
• train the future experts France needs
• develop critical and ethical thinking from an early age
• use AIs with full knowledge of the facts (and know when not to trust them)

To open the black box is to begin to master it.

And when you see the photos of autonomous robot races in Hong Kong classrooms, or the wide eyes of French children who see "their" AI avoid the wall for the first time... you know that something big is in the making.

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Find out more about the AlphAI robot and the entire program on the Learning Robots website.

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