AI-Empowered Education
Education continues to evolve with new technologies enhancing learning opportunities for students across all ages. This new digital age has seen schools and the wider education sector reflect to understand what is important for young people to grow as learners and as people whilst integrating and balancing technology in their lives.
In this rapidly changing world, we are starting to see artificial intelligence (AI) as another tool for supporting student learning.
Isaac L, co-leader of the DCB’s Velocity DeepRacer Club, rightly assesses that “The field of artificial intelligence and machine learning is rapidly developing, with a stronghold in the industries of healthcare, education, marketing, manual labour, and many more... However, the accessibility of machine learning is still being largely limited to those who are highly motivated or academically inclined” According to Isaac, such trend offers new professional horizons to his generation of graduates as “this rapid development in the field of tech, combined with its relative difficulty, makes for a situation in which demand for machine learning engineers is skyrocketing.”
Earlier this month, Dulwich College Beijing held a signing ceremony and workshop with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS is a global leader in AI and cloud computing, and this partnership is our first step in our greater mission to infuse and enhance our STEAM curriculum with AI. In line with our group values of Pioneering Spirit and Students Come First, this is an exciting new development and opportunity for DCB! “It is really,” according to Mr Anthony Coles, Head of College at Dulwich College Beijing, “a collaboration of using the latest ideas to come up with solutions for the problems we don’t even know exist yet.”
We want every student to develop ICT literacy, to be able to understand how computers and AI work and harness it through interdisciplinary projects. Cloud-based computing and AI are going to stretch their thinking and enable them to apply technologies to solve real-world problems.
Mr Yosef Karasik, Director of EdTEch & Innovation, underlines AWS and our College “share a common vision of democratising AI so it is no longer a luxury for the few, but becomes accessible to everyone in our community, regardless of skills, age, or background.” Projects like DeepRacer, Alexa and DeepComposer (music platform) will allow students to learn AI principles in a hands-on, project-based approach. DeepRacer has already started, with four AI autonomous model cars challenging students to apply this new knowledge. It hasn’t taken long for our Velocity DeepRacer Club to pick up this technology with two of our teams ranking first and third in last week’s DeepRacer inter-school competition.
Taking part in the DeepRacer competition has allowed students to learn about machine learning, mathematics, programming, mechanical physics, engineering, but also develop soft skills in communication, budget and project management while learning to collaborate, find potential sponsors…. Such engagement outside the classrooms gives then a window to the world beyond school while reinforcing their academic knowledge by applying them to a practical problem.
