Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a major social impact in the coming years, affecting today’s professions and our daily routines. In the short-term, education is one of the most impacted areas. The autonomous decision making that can be achieved with tools based on AI implies that some of the traditional methodologies associated with the fundamentals of the learning process in students, must be reviewed. Consequently, the role of teachers in the classroom may change, as they will have to deal with such AI tools performing parts of their work, and with students making a common use of them. In this scope, the AI in Education (AIEd) community agrees on the key relevance of developing AI literacies to train teachers and students of all educational levels in the fundamentals of this new technological discipline, so they can understand how these tools based on AI work and pilot the adaptation in an informed way. This implies teaching students about the fundamentals of topics like perception, representation, reasoning, learning, and the impact of AI, with the aim of delivering a solid formation in this area. To support them, formal teaching and learning resources must be developed and tested with students, properly adapted to different educational levels. The main contribution of this proposal lies in the presentation of the Robobo Project, a technological tool based on intelligent robotics that supports such formal AI literacy training for a wide range of ages, from secondary school to higher education. The core part of this paper is focused on showing the possibilities the Robobo Project offers to teachers in a simple way, and how it can be adapted to different levels and skills, leading to a long-term educational proposal. Validation results that support the feasibility of this technology in the education about AI, obtained with students and teachers in different educational levels during a period of six years, are presented and discussed.

The aim of this paper is to provide high school teachers with a structured activity to introduce their students in Natural Interaction fundamentals in the scope of Artificial Intelligence (AI) education. This is a key topic in AI literacy development, and the number of formal activities that can be used at classes is scarce. The one presented here has been designed and tested in the scope of the Erasmus + project called AI +, which aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) curriculum for high school students. AI + follows a Project Based Learning (PBL) teaching methodology, where the AI topics are trained following a practical approach, with a learning by doing perspective. In this case, the students faced the challenge of programming the Robobo educational robot to create a “robotic pet”, which should react to different interactions with the user in a natural way, showing appropriate emotions and using multimodal communication options. Students were introduced in basic aspects of human-robot interaction required to provide their own personality to the robot. The activity was tested in an educational intervention with seventeen high school students from 4 different countries. Due to COVID restrictions, the activity was carried out in online fashion in 2 sessions, using the RoboboSim simulator. Successful results were obtained in terms of understanding of the underlying concepts of Natural Interaction, and their relevance in AI.

This paper presents a structured activity based on a game design to introduce k-12 students in the topic of super-vised machine learning from a practical perspective. The activity has been developed in the scope of an Erasmus+ project called AI+, which aims to develop an AI curriculum for high school students. As established in the AI+ principles, all the teaching activities are based on the use of the student's smartphone as the core element to intro-duce an applied approach to AI in classes. In this case, a smartphone-based game app is developed by students that includes a neural network model obtained with the "Personal Image Classifier" tool of the MIT App Inventor software. From a didactic perspective, the students dealt with supervised learning to solve a problem of image classification. The main learning outcome is the under-standing of how relevant is to develop a reliable machine learning model when dealing with real world applications. This activity was tested during 2021 with more than 50 students belonging to six schools across Europe, all of them enrolled in the AI+ project.

In nature, the physical development of the body that takes place in parallel to the cognitive development of the individual has been shown to facilitate learning. This opens up the question of whether the same principles could be applied to robots in order to accelerate the learning of controllers and, if so, how to apply them effectively. In this line, several authors have run experiments, usually quite complex and heterogeneous, with different levels of success. In some cases, morphological development seemed to provide an advantage and in others it was clearly irrelevant or even detrimental. Basically, morphological development seems to provide an advantage only under some specific conditions, which cannot be identified before running an experiment. This is due the fact that there is still no agreement on the underlying mechanisms that lead to success or on how to design morphological development processes for specific problems. In this paper, we address this issue through the execution of different experiments over a simple, replicable, and straightforward experimental setup that makes use of different neural network controlled walkers together with a morphological development strategy based on growth. The morphological development processes in these experiments are analyzed both in terms of the results obtained by the different walkers and in terms of how their fitness landscapes change as the morphologies develop. By comparing experiments where morphological development improves learning and where it does not, a series of initial insights have been extracted on how to design morphological development processes.

Teaching robotics in secondary school is common nowadays, although with heterogeneous approaches in different countries, mainly in the specific technology that is used. Even with such lack of standardization, there are many common elements in these early stages of educational robotics, focused on basic assembling, simple sensing, and locomotion, which are a consequence of the simplicity of the robots that are used. In this paper, we aim to go one step ahead, and propose an approach of how the next stage in educational robotics should be. To this end, we analyze the current situation of this subject in reference to the robotics market and society, and then we propose a structure for the curriculum development. This approach is based on the use of the Robobo robot, as a clear example of the type of device that allows to perform such update of the subject, and on the use of a STEAM methodology, where a global view of how to face a robotics problem is presented.

The objective of this paper is to show the initial research results obtained with an automatic 3D design software tool we have developed for spool fitting in the pipe workshop of the Navantia Ferrol shipyard. This software tool requires, as input, a CAD file containing the scene with the two pipes to connect, and provides, as output, a CAD file with the fitted spool design. The software detects the features of the spool, and a heuristic pipe routing algorithm generates the output by computing several routes and providing one solution that is near to the optimal one. This output design considers the characteristics and capacities of the manufacturing process, as well as the library of materials used in the shipyard, so it is possible to use it for direct manufacturing. The preliminary results presented here were obtained using real data captured with different commercial 3D scanners over a test setup.

Due to the own activity of the vessels, these are forced to carry out very demanding maintenance policies and surveys. The success of the maintenance process is interesting for all agents of the maritime transport chain; from the loader, interested in the goodness of the transport conditions, to the authorities watching over the safety and prevention at sea. The maintenance policy in the vessels is mainly determined by the mentioned authorities through rules and codes. Therefore, in order to accomplish with the minimum standard legally demanded, those responsible for maintenance must be currently informed of the application of these rules (and their consequences) to the vessels and to the vessel equipment. However, due to the heterogeneity of the sources of maintenance requirements and the different scope of them, this task is highly complex. Thereby, the aim of this paper is to develop a tool able management document to intrinsically relate maintenance information with the operating and dimensional characteristics of the vessel. The results provided by the tool will be particularized to the user's searched objective. The user will be able to easily access, analyse and detect the necessary documentation for the design of a maintenance scheduling.