Chinese schools start new semester with more AI-empowered facilities

BEIJING, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- As millions of primary and middle school students return to school for the autumn semester across China, many find themselves more engaged with digital life, as schools continued to modernize campus facilities with intelligent technology.

On the first day of the new semester on Monday, primary students in a northeast China school were given a fun job: feeding information into an interactive robot to quickly qualify it as a school guidance counselor.

Students enthusiastically performed the mission in groups, collecting and inputting information for the robot called "Xiaofei" to learn, using a software program on a tablet computer to complete the human-machine dialogue.

The robot, provided by China's artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent speech giant iFLYTEK, is just one item in an array of intelligent equipment and facilities at an AI-innovating laboratory in the Liaoshen Street No. 2 Primary School in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning Province.

"The school has vigorously promoted the building of a digital campus," said Li Na, deputy principal of the school, adding that, in addition to introducing a smart education system to support teaching and personalized learning, the AI lab also gets students engaged in computer programming knowledge and robotics applications.

AI teaching has been integrated into the school's classes on physical education (PE), calligraphy writing, Chinese language and art. For example, in the PE class, students wear heart-rate tracking watches to monitor sports health data in real time. Teachers make decisions on assigning different levels of exercises based on the data to prevent safety risks in class.

Liu Tianxiao is a 14-year-old eighth-grader at the Jin Ling High School Hexi Campus in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. A week before the school opened, Liu was among some 100 student volunteers invited to test its new "Smart Playground," an intelligent sports facility integrated with AI and the Internet of Things technology.

Liu and some of his schoolmates were asked to complete a three-minute rope-skipping test on the playground. Their results and ranking were immediately shown on a screen.

The Smart Playground put into use this semester covers an area of 16,000 square meters on the campus field. It can employ facial recognition to help PE teachers monitor students' performance in a variety of sports items, including rope-skipping, running, jumping, medicine-ball throwing, pull-ups and sit-ups.

Chu Xinlu, head of the sports department, said the school was the first to pilot the "Smart Playground" in the province. From this semester, the intelligent sports facility, co-developed by the school and the Jiangsu Sports Industry Group Co., Ltd., will serve more than 7,000 students and 700 teachers in the school.

In February this year, China's Ministry of Education announced 184 AI education pilot bases in primary and secondary schools to further explore new concepts, new models and new schemes of AI education.

The Beijing No. 18 Middle School, one of the pilot bases, has installed intelligent blackboards in the classrooms. On Monday, students were seen conducting a simulated chemistry experiment of "reaction between methane and chlorine" on the blackboard's touch screen.

In another pilot school -- the Beijing No. 20 Middle School -- each student in an English class holds a small intelligent terminal device for oral practice, which can instantly give pronunciation and grammar analysis feedbacks to the speaker.

The system can provide intelligent voice evaluation, mark revision and collect data, helping teachers to quickly check the performance of each student.

In Chinese schools, it is common to have large class sizes, with one teacher facing dozens of students. Now, with the help of digital devices and the AI-empowered systems, teachers can provide targeted teaching and personalized assistance.

Cao Peijie, deputy director of the digital education research institute of the China National Academy of Educational Sciences, said that the digitization of school education is an effective way to narrow the education gap and improve the quality of education. China is committed to implementing a national strategy of digitization in education, promoting the extensive sharing of high-quality education resources, Cao said.