Science Education and Artificial Intelligence – A Chatbot on Magic and Quantum Computing as an Educational Tool

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has entered the realm of higher education and has become an impressive emerging field. Since AI is starting also to be applied to Science Education, here an assay is provided while the opportunities of AI in a particular case of Science Education are reviewed and assessed, namely a chatbot on Quantum Computing, another awesome emerging field. Indeed, Quantum Computing is based on a set of principles that are difficult to understand by the general population, so the ultimate goal of such a chatbot is to learn a few complex concepts in this field and to increase public understanding and awareness of Science. Actually, AI is starting also to be applied to Science Communication, even though progress is not so advanced as in learning.
Magic tricks based on mathematical principles are especially well suited to teach difficult concepts, like those related to Quantum Science. They are used to explain entanglement, quantum cryptography, the superposition principle, and other quantum-related concepts – along with other physical and chemical core elements like Entropy.
Developing a chatbot is not especially difficult (e.g., with Botpress, Watson, Dialogflow, Manybot, etc.). One may build either scripted, intelligent, or application bots. Indeed, the first ones are those that are easiest to create, and correspond to the first phase of the current project. Intelligent bots understand natural spoken language and correspond to a second phase in this project. In general, Bots are connected to a real-world messaging service, like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Telegram, Slack, etc.