Thiruvananthapuram: Over 400,000 students in Kerala will be familiarised with AI in the coming academic year with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) textbooks for Grade 7. One of the activities in the chapter on 'Computer Vision' involves students creating their own AI program that can recognise human facial expressions. The program can identify up to seven different emotions appearing on a person's face. “This is the first time in India that an entire class of students will get an opportunity to learn AI uniformly,” said K. Anbar Sudhath, chairman of the ICT Textbook Committee and CEO of KITE. The 'PictoBlox' package along with 'Scratch' software to teach visual programming will be introduced in the textbooks, allowing students to practice programming, AI, robotics and more. The Kerala Institute of Educational Infrastructure and Technology (KITE), the technology wing of the general education department, will ensure that all the software essential for this is available on the laptops that will be provided to schools. The new ICT textbooks for grades 1 and 3 include FOSS (free and open source software) based educational applications such as GCompris, eduActiv8, OmniTux and TuxPaint covering drawing, reading, language learning, calculation, arithmetic and rhythm. In addition to these, applications developed by KITE such as Traffic Signal, where children learn traffic rules, and Waste Challenge, which teaches waste disposal in game mode, are also included in the ICT textbooks. In addition, the new textbooks also feature language labs. “The new ICT textbooks introduce practical ICT activities that develop life skills, while also helping in the study of other subjects and providing guidance on cyber safety and identifying fake news,” Amber said. KITE began AI training for 80,000 secondary school teachers from May 2 this year, and 20,120 teachers have completed the training so far.
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