Informatics education and school: some reflections

The talk presents some personal reflections on informatics education in school: which concepts should be focusing on and whether/how this has changed and might change (or not?) with the explosion of artificial intelligence

1. Enrico Nardelli
Univ. Roma “Tor Vergata”
Director National Lab “Informatics & School” of CINI
Past President of Informatics Europe
Congrès Annuel de la Société Informatique de France
Poitiers, 7 june 2024
Informatics education and
school: some reflections

2. Enrico Nardelli © 2024 Informatics education and school: some reflections 2
Albert Einstein on education (1931)
•… develop a harmonious personality, not a
specialist (even for technical schools)
•… develop a general ability for independent
thinking and judgement, not acquisition of
special knowledge
•… will surely find their way and will be able to
adapt themselves to progress and changes
better than those who acquired detailed knowledge

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David Foster Wallace on education (2005)
•The freedom given by real education is learning
how to consciuously decide what has meaning
and what has not
•The real value of real education … has everything to
do with the awareness of what is real and
essential

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The aim of school education
•To become citizens aware of the questions at stake
and able to fully participate to a free and
democratic debate
•Knowledge is fundamental to be able to decide
•Education is needed to give meaning to
democracy

5. Informatics education and school: some reflections 5Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Languages to represent knowledge
Natural language
If a cake is one kilo how much is three quarters of two
thirds of it?
Mathematics
3 2
4 3
X

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1
1
1 2
4 1
X

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1
2
2
4
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6. Informatics education and school: some reflections 6Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Testimonials
Peter Naur, 1967, and George Forsythe, 1968
Informatics, like natural language and mathematics, is a
general-purpose language, useful for many subjects
Bernard Chazelle, 2006
Informatics will play in XXI century the same role as
mathematics in XX century
Bruno Frey, 2017, and Brian Arthur, 2020
Reactive, verb-based disciplines are better described by
informatics than mathematics

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The third fundamental “language”
•Natural language: the language of social relations
•Mathematics: the language of quantitative relations
•Informatics: the language of
automated processing of representations

8. Informatics education and school: some reflections 8Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Revolutions in the power relations
Printing press: 1st revolution
Breaks the power of authority
Industrial revolution: 2nd
Alters the power relation
between mankind and nature
Informatics revolution: 3rd
Challenges intellectual superiority
of mankind over machines

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Cognitive Machines (1)
●
They connect and
process
representations to
derive new
representations

10. Informatics education and school: some reflections 10Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Cognitive machines (2)
Many ways of knowing
Intelligence is a multidimensional construct while
these machines have only logic and pure rationality
Amplifiers of our cognitive capabilities
Cognitive machines are to our rational brain what
industrial machines are to our physical body

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The question of meaning
•Representations, i.e. signs, are "symbols", they refer
to a meaning, but only for a (human) interpreter
Object
/ Concept
Representation
/ Sign
Interpreter
/ Observer
cavallo
horse
cheval

12. Informatics education and school: some reflections 12Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Cognitive machines (3)
They manipulate symbols
–whose meaning they do not know,
–by executing instructions whose meaning they do
not know,
–but produces symbols that have meaning for
humans
This is the “power revolution”, however
–Not “intelligence” artificially obtained (like
“artificial heart”)
–But “mechanical intelligence”

13. Informatics education and school: some reflections 13Enrico Nardelli © 2024
Key concepts for school education: my view
•Representation
•Automata and languages
•Algorithms and programs
•Duality
•Distributed computation
•Virtualization

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•A coalition, consisting of
ACM Europe
CEPIS
IFIP
Informatics Europe (IE)
https://informaticsforall.org

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Informatics Reference Framework
•Education is a devolved matter in Europe:
countries / educational regions have responsibility
for their own curricula
•The Reference Framework is at a higher level than
any curriculum document
•It offers guidance to curricula designers by providing
a coherent vision and shared terminology
•Work from October 2020 to February 2022
•Broad consultation and feedback received from 14
European countries

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Aims and objectives
At the end of upper secondary education, pupils will:
1.Use digital tools in a conscious, responsible, confident and
creative way.
2.Understand the concepts and practices of informatics and
their multifaceted applications.
3.Analyse, design, frame and solve problems
informatically.
4.Creatively develop computational models to investigate
and communicate about phenomena and systems.
5.Identify and discuss ethical and social issues associated
with computational systems and their use, potential
benefits and risks.

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•Synthetic and short
17 pages
•A minimum set of high-level common requirements
Room for national communities to derive curricula tuned to local
culture and needs while coherent with a common European vision of
Informatics in School
•An enduring foundation of 11 core topics
Foundational and invariant terms possessing temporal robustness
•Contemporary context and implications
A brief contemporary interpretation of the core topics illustrating
richness, relevance for all (potential specialisation topics)
•Indicators of outcomes (annex)
These are not intended to be prescriptive and are provided for
illustrative purposes only to stimulate thinking and action of curricula
designers
Informatics Reference Framework for School

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11 core topics
Data and Information
Algorithms
Programming
Computing systems
Networks and Communications
Human-computer Interaction
Design and Development
Digital creativity
Modeling and Simulation
Privacy, safety and security
Responsibility and Empowerment

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The European Recommendation
•Approved by the Council of the European Union on November
23rd, recommends to Member States:
•support high-quality informatics education at primary and
secondary level […], with particular attention to
•foster the provision of high quality education in informatics from
the start of compulsory education, with clear learning
objectives, dedicated time and structured assessment, with the aim
of offering all learners the opportunity to develop their digital skills
and competences through scientifically sound pedagogical methods
•ensure that teaching of informatics […] is provided by qualified
teachers with access to quality and accessible learning resources
[…] and with the appropriate assessment of learning outcomes

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A paradigm change
•The technical document which supported the Recommendation
proposal put forward by the European Commission in Aprile 2023:
•while «internationally … there is a fast emerging trend in
educational systems to include Informatics as part of national
curricula and as part of the general education for all»
•in Europe «for some time, most educational systems fell behind
this trend, focusing more on digital literacy and with the
digitalisation of teaching»
•and admits that «the main limitation of this approach is that,
despite providing pupils the means to use digital technologies, it
does not fully equip them with the ability to create, control and
develop digital contents».

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Generative AI systems
•AI is to informatics revolution what electricity has
been to industrial revolution
•Can bring the power of cognitive machines to
everybody
•Produce data from other data with a level of
competence which appears similar to that of humans
•Production can be marred by error or inaccuracies
•One cannot trust the AI answer unless knows the
TRUE answer

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Possible risks for generative AI (1)
●
We project onto their outputs the meaning which
is within us
–Intelligence is in the brain of the reader
●
«We are meaning-seeking creatures. Biologically, our
nervous systems are organized in such a way that the
brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into
configurations.»
I.Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, 1989.

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Possible risks for generative AI (2)
●
Not all technologies can be freely used by everyone
(e.g., cars)
●
Really dangerous technologies are severely restricted
●
Children learning to walk
●
Fatigue is a necessary and unavoidable component of
training oneself to become competent in a certain field
–Sport, arts, language
●
To ban tools that can relieve of intellectual fatigue
does not make sense unless there is a strong case for
it, e.g. the learning process

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Possible risks for generative AI (3)
●
Allowing our children to use generative AI systems in
an unrestricted way before their full development
means undermining their chances of growth on the
cognitive level
●
Not prohibition, but awareness and education
●
See what’s happened with the use of digital
technologies by children
–European Parliament resolution (Dec.2023) on
addictive design of online services
●
Don’t rush with the crowd

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The essence of education
•Teaching by means of digital tools implies
substituting the personal relations between teacher
and student
–which has an important affective component –
as Plato discussed in his Dialogues, and
–which requires being together in the same
physical place
•with a dis-embodied relation mediated by digital
technology
This is the death of the pedagogical endevaour

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How to really improve education ?
•Personalized learning → More teachers
•Improving learning → More tutors, more libraries,
more laboratories
•Some repetitive task could be done by tools,
however:
–Privacy is the key issues
–Risk of mechanizing people

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Some reflections
•Home assignments less and less important
•Classroom work more and more important
•Showing “here and now” what one has learned and is capable to do
•Creative production = generating + filtering
•Generative AI tools can help instructors in generating
–plans for lessons and courses
–exercises and exams
–material for students’ practice
–presentations for lectures
–summaries of text
–text from a table of content
•However, the ultimate responsibility always lies with the instructor

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THANKS!
Enrico Nardelli
Univ. Roma “Tor Vergata”
http://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli/
@enriconardelli
http://www.linkedin.com/in/enriconardelli
https://www.facebook.com/enrico.nardelli