France-Hong Kong collaboration to introduce students to artificial intelligence

What if AI became a universal learning language? This is the audacious challenge of an international scientific collaboration led by the CNRS team in educational sciences headed by Thomas Deneux (Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay, CNRS & Université Paris-Saclay) and Professor Siu-Cheung Kong 's team (The Education University of Hong Kong).

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This initiative is based on an innovative teaching program in artificial intelligence for secondary schools, designed around concrete, interactive tools such as educational robotics. AlphAI software, developed by Learning Robots, plays a central role, enabling students to pilot a robot and understand fundamental AI concepts visually and intuitively.

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Already tested in some twenty classes in Hong Kong, these ambitious educational activities were tested for the first time in French schools in April. The aim? To validate the multicultural scope of this educational program on AI.

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Three days of experimentation were organized:

• April 4, at the Lycée Fustel de Coulanges in Massy (Académie de Versailles), with second-year students.
• April 7 and 8, at Collège Louise Michel in Clichy-sous-Bois (Créteil academy), with classes of 5ᵉ and 3ᵉ.

These workshops were co-hosted by a team of six researchers: Thomas Deneux and his doctoral student Marie Absalon, as well as Siu-Cheung Kong, Yin Yang, Wing Kei Yeung and So Sum Chow, who came specially from Hong Kong for the occasion. In a fun and interactive way, the students discovered advanced concepts such as backpropagation and reinforcement learning, and applied them to robot racing and line following.

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Feedback has been extremely positive, from teachers and students alike. These experiments have confirmed the educational relevance and cultural adaptability of this program, which combines scientific rigor with accessibility.

But the project doesn't stop there. Building on the success of this initial phase, the two teams will continue to refine the program's content, with the aim of extending it to a larger number of classes by the start of the new school year.

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At the same time, the Hong Kong team gave a lecture at the Université Paris-Saclay. Entitled "Harnessing Generative AI for English Writing to Cultivate Self-Regulated Learning in Future-Ready Education", it was presented by Nicole Yin YANG and explored the use of generative AI to stimulate student autonomy in learning to write.

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At Learning Robots, we're proud to see AlphAI playing a key role in this international initiative. It's further proof thatartificial intelligence can become a powerful lever for rethinking education, here and elsewhere.

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