A School in Hangzhou, China has install a facial recognition technology which scans students’ faces every 30 seconds to know when they are sad, happy, disappointed, scared or surprised.
This seems to be a test run because the gadget is installed only in one school but reports say if it becomes successful it will be installed in school s across China.
This new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhou’s No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students’ facial expressions and general behaviour and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering. It is called “smart classroom behaviour management.”
Chinese media reports say that the AI-powered software is able to pick up seven different emotions, including neutral, happy, sad, disappointed, angry, scared and surprised, and will send a notification to the teacher to take action if it detects that one or more students are distracted during class.
The data gathered by the software could also be used to evaluate teachers’ performance in class.
One of the teachers at No. 11 Middle School told RFA,“Installing this management system is mainly to show kids where they are concentrating the hardest, and where the problems are. It will indicate their levels of concentration in class, and in areas where they’re not concentrating, it will make it easier for the teacher to go over sections again. Maybe some kids think that it will be watching them the whole time, but they are maybe making too much out of it, because they will feel pressured, but that’s not the point of it. It’s about getting the children to learn properly the whole time they are in class.”
This is taking educational technology to another level if it works.