Louise Moon, "Pay attention at the back: Chinese school installs facial recognition cameras to keep an eye on pupils ", published 16 May 2018 on South China Morning Post. Available: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2146387/pay-attention-back-chinese-school-installs-facial-recognition
The school said it could use the cameras to analyse pupils’ facial expressions to determine whether they were enjoying lessons and whether they were paying attention.
“Using this system we can see which classmates are concentrating in class and whose mind is wandering,” the school’s head teacher, Ni Ziyuan, was quoted as saying.
The system also measures levels of attendance by using a database of pupils’ faces and names to check who is in the classroom.
Jiayun Feng, "Chinese Parents Want Students To Wear Dystopian Brainwave-Detecting Headbands", published 5 Apr 2019 on supchina. Available: https://supchina.com/2019/04/05/chinese-parents-want-students-to-wear-dystopian-brainwave-detecting-headbands/
"Under AI’s Watchful Eye, China Wants to Raise Smarter Students", published 19 September 2019 on Wall Street Journal | Video. Available: https://www.wsj.com/video/under-ais-watchful-eye-china-wants-to-raise-smarter-students/C4294BAB-A76B-4569-8D09-32E9F2B62D19.html
Transcript:
[Child's voice, Mandarin]: Red means you're deeply focused.
[VO]: Teachers at this primary school in China —
[Child's voice, Mandarin]: Blue means you're distracted.
[VO]: know exactly when someone isn't paying attention.
[Mandarin, Narrator]: White means you're offline.
[VO]: These headbands measure each student's level of concentration.
The information is then directly sent to the teacher's computer
and to parents.
China has big plans to become a global leader in artificial intelligence.
It has enabled a cashless economy,
where people make purchases with their faces.
A giant network of surveillance cameras
with facial recognition helps police monitor citizens.
Meanwhile, some schools offer glimpses of what the future
of high tech education in the country might look like.
Classrooms have robots that analyze students' health
and engagement levels.
Students wear uniforms with chips that track their locations.
There are even surveillance cameras that monitor
how often children check their phones or yawn during classes.
These gadgets have alarmed Chinese netizens.
[Weibo quotes, on screen]:
"That's too scary."
"Kids these days suffer too much."
"This is worse than being a prisoner."
[VO]: But schools say it wasn't hard for them getting parental consent
to enroll their kids into what is one of the world's largets experiments
in AI education.
A program that's supposed to boost students' grades
while also feeding powerful algorithms.
[Zhang Jiao Jiao, parent, Mandarin]: If it's for our country's research and
development, I don't think it's a problem.
[VO]: The government has poured billions of dollars into the project.
Bringing together tech giants, start-ups and schools.
We got exclusive access to a primary school a few hours
outside of Shanghai to see firsthand how AI tech is being used
in the classroom.
[Title card]: Zhejiang: Jinhua Xiaoshun County Primary School
[Children, Mandarin]: Good morning everyone.
[VO]: For this fifth grade glass, the day begins with
putting on a brain wave sensing gadget.
Students then practice meditating.
[Teacher, Mandarin]: Now, imagine a warm light glowing
between your eyebrows.
[VO]: The device is made in China and has three electrodes,
two behind the ears and one on the forehead.
These sensors pick up electrical signals sent
by neurons in the brain.
The neural data is then sent in real time to the teacher's computer,
so while students are solving math problems,
a teacher can quickly find out who's paying attention
and who's not.
[Zhu Jiangli, teacher, Mandarin]: During this period,
this student is a bit distracted.
[VO]: A report is then generated that shows how well
the class was paying attention.
It even details each student's concentration level
at 10 minute intervals.
It's then sent to a chat group for parents.
[Unknown man showing a spreadsheet on his phone, Mandarin]:
Here, you can check every student's score
[VO]: The reports are detailed,
but whether these devices really work
and what they exactly measure isn't as clear.
[Children speaking to Shen Hong, WSJ Shanghai Bureau Chief, Mandarin]:
Red means you're very focused.
[VO]: We were curious if the headbands
could actually measure concentration, so one of our reporters
[Shen Hong]: tried on the device.
[Shen Hong, Mandarin]: But I don't feel particularly focused.
[Boy, Mandarin]: This headband works when you're thinking.
[Theodore Zanto, Neuroscientist]: This is a new technology with,
still, fairly little research behind it.
[VO]: Theodore Zanto is a neural scientist
at the University of California San Fransisco.
He was surprised to learn that this tech,
called electroencephalography, also known as EEG,
is being used in the classroom on children.
It's usually used by doctors in hospitals and labs.
[Zanto]: EEG is very susceptible to artifacts. And so,
if you are itchy or just a little fidgety,
or the EEG wasn't set up properly, so that the electrodes
didn't have a good contact, affects the signal.
[VO]: Despite teh chances for false readings,
teachers told us the headbands have forced students
to become more disciplined.
[Zhang Yiwei, teacher, Mandarin]: When the students answer
my questions during class, they are louder than usual.
[VO]: Teachers say the students now pay better attention
during class, and that has made them study harder and achieve
higher scores.
[Boy, Mandarin]: I've become more attentive in class.
All of my assignments come back with perfect grades.
[Boy, in a classroom of children packing up to leave, Mandarin]:
It hurts [as he takes off the headband, probably referring to
the discomfort after wearing it for an extended period of time]:.
[VO]: But not all students are as ethusiastic.
[Boy, Mandarin]: When we first wore teh headband,
it felt like it was controlling us.
[Another boy, pointing at his forehead, Mandarin]:
I feel pressure here. The headband is tight.
[VO]: This fifth grader, whom we caught dozing off in class,
told us his parents punish him for low attention scores.
And that kind of data adds a new kind of pressure for students.
[Boy, Mandarin]: Imagine there's an exam,
and everyone gets a score of 95 or higher,
but you get a score of 85. Wouldn't you feel behind?
[VO]: Companies we interviewed said the data can go
to government funded research projects.
We spoke to parents who were unclear about where the data ended
up, and they didn't seem to care too much.
Zanto says, there's likely no privacy protection at all.
[Zanto]: The classroom is — you're trying
to make an assessment of an individual student,
you really can't anatomize it.
[VO]: Experts and citizens alike are sounding alarms about
various aspects of the country's huge push into artificial
intelligence. These classrooms are laboratories for
future generations. And while these new tools
may potentially help some two hundred million students
raise their grades, just how this all works out won't be
apparent until they become adult citizens.