Kerala includes Artificial Intelligence learning in school textbooks

Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala has taken a big leap in education by including Artificial Intelligence (AI) in school textbooks.

With the introduction of AI learning in the Information & Communication Technology ( ICT ) textbook of Class 7, over 4 lakh students in Kerala will get familiarized with AI in the upcoming academic year.

One of the activities in the 'Computer Vision' chapter will involve students creating their own AI program that can recognize human facial expressions. This program will be able to identify up to seven different emotions on a person's face. It is the first time in India that all students in a class are getting an opportunity to learn AI uniformly.

The new Academic Year which kick starts on June 3rd, 2024 will see new ICT textbooks for Classes 1, 3, 5, and 7 in Malayalam, English, Tamil, and Kannada mediums. The curriculum framework emphasizes the development of children's critical thinking, analytical skills, and problem-solving abilities, which are essential for their holistic development.

In this context, special emphasis has been placed on the development of logical thinking and programming skills in the ICT textbooks for the primary level.

The 'PictoBlox' package, along with 'Scratch' software that teaches visual programming, is introduced in the textbooks to enable students to practice programming, AI, robotics, etc. Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), the technology arm of Depart of General Education, will make available all the essential software for this in the laptops deployed in schools.

The new ICT textbooks for Classes 1 and 3 include FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) based educational applications such as GCompris, eduActiv8, OmniTux, and TuxPaint which cover drawing, reading, language learning, numeracy, operations, and rhythm. In addition to these, applications developed by KITE such as Traffic Signal through which children learn about traffic rules, and Waste Challenge which teaches waste disposal through gaming mode are also included in the ICT textbook. Further, Language labs are also featured in the new textbooks.

“The new ICT textbooks present practical ICT activities that nurture life skills while also helping in the study of other subjects and providing guidance on cyber safety and fake news identification”, says K.Anvar Sadath who is the Chairman of ICT Textbook Committee and also the CEO of KITE. KITE commenced the AI training for 80,000 secondary school teachers from 2nd May 2024 onwards and so far 20120 teachers completed the training.

V.Sivankutty, Minister for General Education Dept has already issued instructions to provide training to all Primary school teachers on the new ICT textbooks from June onwards. New ICT textbooks will be introduced for Classes 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 10 next academic year.