Submitted Abstract
The UL, through its Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT), has partnered with SCRIPT and the Edward Steichen High School at Clervaux- Lycée Edward Steichen à Clervaux (LESC) in defining the present project proposal Smart Schoul 2025. The goal of Smart Schoul 2025 is to create a fertile environment for pupils to be motivated to participate in designing digital tools and solutions. Being exposed to computer science at an early age could potentially trigger the switch and inspire a digital consumer to become a digital creator or, at least, an ICT enthusiast. This is the general goal of public outreach activities. However, as reported in many studies [ref], and based on the consortium’s experience within the Luxembourgish environment, two main challenges must be tackled: 1) Lack of motivation among pupils; and 2) Lack of incentives for researchers.. The idea behind the proposed Smart Schoul 2025 project is to create a framework and a platform for an exciting exchange between ICT researchers and school pupils. As its name indicates it , this project will deploy a smart school platform to give all pupils access to technology, and enable them to use it on a daily basis, but not only. This platform will incorporate multiple tools that researchers themselves use and/or develop. Specifically, Smart Schoul 2025 will embed computer vision and artificial intelligence components that are the core elements used in ICT and smart schools for interaction, such as, gesture control, recognition of people, actions, or objects, behaviour sensing, object tracking, etc. Using these technologies for their daily interactions at school, pupils’ curiosity should be triggered, and this would lead them to enquire, propose, and ultimately participate in the design of new features. At the end of the day, they would have gained interest, knowledge, and possibly hands-on experience. This could only happen within a framework allowing an intensive participation of researchers, school teachers, the pupils themselves, and their parents. A collaborative work in preparing this framework and defining its contents needs to take place.