How teaching AI in schools could help equip students for future careers

If recent clickbait headlines are to be believed, robots are already taking over our schools, relegating "Sir" or "Miss" to the status of a second-rate computer dumped at the back of the class. Yet to many experts, the real value of artificial intelligence (AI) to education may be far more humdrum as a back-of-house tool to free up time for human teachers to build students' social skills, resilience, appetite for learning and character. Miles Berry, principal lecturer in computing education at the University of Roehampton and a key architect of the national curriculum for computing, introduced to replace ICT four years ago, is disappointed at how few schools have exploited the new programme fully. "AI is difficult to teach and schools either lack relevant resources or don't know how to apply them, but in order to plug the technology skills gap, we must give our youngsters time to experiment with creating rudimentary chatbots for example," he says. "Setting up a Google Assistant, Apple Siri or Amazon Alexa and getting it to answer some of the questions that come up in a lesson would be a fairly simple task for many computing teachers, but to get them on-side, we need to talk far more about the role of machine-learning and far less about the dawn of the robots."