Abstract:

The field of Artificial Intelligence was born in the middle of the 1950’s and it has been applied to an increasing number of aspects of our life since then. The purpose of Artificial Intelligence is to build intelligent machines, or at least machines that behave as if they were intelligent. Early on, a method to establish the intelligence of machines was devised: the Turing Test. In this paper, some of the contributions of Artificial Intelligence to the field of education are explored. At the beginning, a description of the origins of Artificial Intelligence is given, together with a definition of the field. Then, some of the most relevant subfields of Artificial Intelligence are briefly described, including deep learning, reinforcement learning, robotics, computer vision, natural language processing and human computation. After that, some contributions of robotics, intelligent tutoring systems and learning analytics to the field of education are explored. The use of robots as a didactic tool is analyzed, and three recent examples of didactic robots that have reached the market are given. Intelligent tutoring systems are capable of using Artificial Intelligence techniques and detecting different variables of the learning process, but they have not influenced education processes as much as it was expected. Three examples of intelligent tutoring systems are given, and some of the reasons for their lack of adoption are explained. Finally, the field of learning analytics is described and some important conditions for a successful project in learning analytics are mentioned.

Keywords:

Artificial intelligence, education, educational robotics, intelligent tutoring systems.