Keywords

1 Introduction

This paper compares ICT education in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) [1] in Italy and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) purely in terms of media education [2]. It refers to other studies to describe the history [3], the service to citizens [4], the risks and myths [5] and the current and future levels of development in robotics and AI [6]. The starting point for this research is the recommendations to the European Commission on civil law rules on robotics [7] written in 2017 by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs. The focus of the recommendations is digital citizenship, which is needed for self-actualization, employability, social inclusion and responsibility. According to article 5 of the law, students should analyze, compare and critically evaluate data information, which today often comes from robots and machines that use artificial intelligence; students should identify appropriate forms of digital communication, robotics are a form of media; students should “be able to avoid risks using digital technologies for health and threats to one's physical and psychological well-being,” and here it is important to know the risks linked to robots [8]. Thus, this law encouraged educational research to improve certain criteria for implementing these topics alongside students, teachers, families and industry experts. More specifically, all decision processes that affect digital citizenship should have the support of children and teenagers.

2 An Explorative Student SWOT Analysis on Robotics

For the above reasons, this paper has the following process: an educator in media studies in a fifth-year class (Table 1) at Istituto Statale Caravaggio upper secondary school in San Gennaro Vesuviano, Italy (www.iscaravaggio.gov.it) invited the students to prepare a SWOT analysis on the European recommendations on robotics. This would involve compiling a list of points highlighting their opinions and beliefs on robotics, based on their real-life experience. These ideas were then classified as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and presented in table form along with direct quotes from the European document. Table 2 shows the results of the survey conducted in the 2018/19 academic year. The survey will be repeated in 2019/20 on new sets of students in two countries: (1) approximately 50 students in two fifth-year classes of the same upper secondary school in Italy; (2) approximately 75 students in their first year of university at Institut Supérieur des Techniques Appliquées in DRC; the research will take place in the fall semester to ensure the students are of comparable age. The Italian students were chosen for the research because there was open access to the school for their participation; the same is true for the students in Kinshasa. Researchers expect to find similarities between the Italian and Congolese SWOT analyses. Finally, this process aims to follow best practices in inclusive education [9], to find a proven approach to robotics, from a media education perspective, and share this approach with other countries.

Table 1 Details of fifth-year upper secondary class (2018/19)
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Table 2 Results of the SWOT analysis of Italian upper secondary school students (2018–19)
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As described above, a media educator first read the EU recommendations to the students. The students were then invited to state their opinions of them in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, for the purposes of the SWOT analysis. Classmates decided to confirm or reject each idea as a strength, weakness, opportunity or threat, or revise the opinion for inclusion in another section of the SWOT analysis. The reading of the recommendations and the students’ work to produce the final version of the shared SWOT analysis with the quoted text took approximately eight hours.

In summary, Table 2 shows that students are wary of the threats of robotics, but they hope it will improve homecare, healthcare and liberate them from manual jobs, although this may not decrease divisions in society. These data will be compared with any obtained in future years in Italy and other countries, to find potential patterns.

3 Italy and DR Congo: A Predictive Comparison

Every year, the education system in DRC produces large numbers of graduates, who, unfortunately, usually struggle to get work. As a result, some of them try to start their own businesses to avoid unemployment. For example, one Congolese startup has developed “Taxmwinda,” a platform for paying taxes. This platform uses a white-box approach [10] and includes four subsets: a database, an SMS handler, and a mobile payment layer. Another Congolese startup “AgroMwinda” launched a web platform to support small farmers and local organizations, by providing innovative solutions and attractive services that make them more visible to customers. Finally, a Congolese women’s technology startup led by Thérèse Izay, an engineer from Institut Supérieur des Techniques Appliquées, designed a robot that controls traffic lights, and will replace some traffic police on the street. The government will partly fund the production of more robots. Interest in robotics in DRC has led to the idea of an international collaboration to repeat the research previously done in Italy, as described above, at the Institut Supérieur des Techniques Appliquées in the DRC’s capital, Kinshasa. To start this collaboration, the Italian researchers asked their Congolese colleagues a number of questions (Table 3) that can be generalized for other international institutions that might decide to join this research.

Table 3 Answers provided by the researchers at the Institut Supérieur des Techniques Appliquées (ISTA). Please note that the Congolese research group is aware of other research published by their Italian colleagues
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4 Conclusion

In conclusion, in the 2019–20 academic year, the Italian and Congolese researchers will work in parallel, gathering new data from a total of 50 Italian students (who will be added to those involved in 2018–19) and 70 Congolese students. These data will undergo a qualitative analysis because the SWOT analysis is already divided into information categories, revealing a variety of concepts that are grouped together from the collected data. The data will also be analyzed on the basis of several research questions: (1) Do Italians and Congolese have common parameters for evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of robotics? (2) Are there any cultural factors that might align the previous considerations? Obviously, the limited number of students involved in this research means that the resulting data are not analyzed quantitatively. The aim of the study is to introduce the topic of media education in robotics, which needs to be explored in more depth. This paper simply describes the activities of the researchers and shows the preliminary results. It further aims to present a new perspective for the introduction of robotics to fifth-year upper secondary school classes, as part of media education, and shows an experience that can help advance theoretical knowledge in educational robotics, and its effect on contemporary society, which students should be learning at school.