AI has entered the classroom - but is it the solution for overworked teachers? Schools across the UK are trialling the use of deepfake teachers and even employing remote staff to deliver lessons hundreds of miles away from the classroom. It comes as the use of AI is becoming increasingly prevalent in schools. The government says AI has the power to transform education, and improve teacher workload, particularly around admin for teachers. The BBC has spoken to teachers, school leaders and unions who seem divided on what the future of the UK's classrooms should look like.

Content filed under the artificial intelligence taxonomy.

Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their integral part. We start by comparing our experience with four basic alternatives of teaching embedded systems: 1) interacting with hardware at school, 2) having remote access to hardware, 3) lending hardware to students for at-home work and 4) virtualizing hardware. Afterward, we evaluate in detail our experience of the fast transition from traditional, offline at-school hardware programming course to using remote access to real hardware present in the lab. The somewhat unusual remote hardware access approach turned out to be a fully viable alternative for teaching embedded systems, enabling a relatively low-effort transition. Our setup is based on existing solutions and stable open technologies without the need for custom-developed applications that require high maintenance. We evaluate the experience of both the students and teachers and condense takeaways for future courses. The specific environment setup is available online as an inspiration for others.

Gabriel Guimaraes grew up in Vitória, Brazil, in a yellow house surrounded by star-fruit trees and chicken coops. His father, who wrote software for a local bank, instilled in him an interest in computers. On weekends, when Guimaraes got bored with Nintendo video games, he programmed his own. In grade school, he built a humanoid robot and wrote enough assembly code to make it zip around his home. In Vitória, an island city, his most ambitious peers dreamed of attending university in São Paulo, an hour away by plane.