A new “tick less and talk more” AI tool designed to help FE teachers assess electronics practical work is set to launch this year.
The tool, Elecafa.AI, is a teachers’ “buddy” that has been trained to visually assess soldering work on circuit boards and provide “constructive feedback”.
It promises to “significantly reduce assessment lead times”, freeing up more time for teachers to focus on teaching and “authentic curriculum and assessment design”, according to tender documents.
Elecafa.AI consists of a microscope with a camera and a computer application, students show it circuit boards they have soldered and it provides feedback on the quality of each joint “in under a second”, including reasoning, an overall score, and advice on how to improve.
Assessing students’ soldering work on vocational courses involving electronics – such as BTECs, T Levels and Higher Technical Qualifications – can take a teacher “minutes” for each board, said Jessica Leigh Jones, co-owner of iungo Solutions, which created Elecafa.AI.
Speaking to FE Week, Leigh Jones, who previously sat on the board of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE), said: “Learners can use it as a simple self-service tool to gain instant formative feedback and work – and teachers can use it for the same thing.
“Unlike most AI which are computer based or large language models looking at numeracy and literacy, we’re looking at physical and practical types of work. We’ve developed it to look at electronics specifically, that’s why it’s called ‘Elecafa’.
“Essentially, we’re looking at soldering activity, a really essential tool that’s that taught in schools. Often you have quite small classes because they need a lot of support.
“It’s really important to just say, this is in no way intended to replace the teacher. This is about speeding up mundane tasks to really allow the teachers to spend more time with learners in their class, or workshop in this case.”
Elecafa.AI was funded in November with £69,695 from the Department for Education (DfE) through Innovate UK, which ran a procurement competition offering £50,000 to £200,000 from a £1 million fund for tools which use AI to support teachers with assessment and feedback.
Leigh Jones said iungo Solutions has one month left to “refine” the product before making it the app, circuit boards, components and microscope kit available for schools and colleges to buy.
She added: “We’ve done lots of piloting, we’ve had a range of schools soldering with them and trying them out.
“We’ve seen it works, but it’s probably going to take a year or two of data to see what those benefits look like.”
An “attractive” part of the deal for the company was that the government would grant fund early development of the tool, which was built “from scratch”, while iungo Solutions retains intellectual property rights.
The tool also draws its ability to provide pedagogical advice and feedback from the government owned ‘education content store’, which contains a quality-assured library of educational content and code available to train AI models.
The £3 million content store was announced in August last year with the hope of generating accurate, high-quality content, such as lesson plans and workbooks that can reliably be used in schools and colleges.
Leigh Jones, who co-founded iungo Solutions with Tom de Vall, is a former non-executive director of the IfATE and interim chair of Welsh awarding organisation WJEC.
She stepped down from IfATE in 2023 to mitigate a potential conflict of interest after iungo Solutions won a contract to provide skills bootcamps.
She said: “I did GCSE electronics in school, at the time one of only ten percent of schools in Wales that offered it and it set me up on my career path.
“But the number of schools offering it in Wales is getting smaller every year, so this is really positive.”
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “Artificial Intelligence presents a truly transformative opportunity to modernise education.
“I’m determined to seize this opportunity with both hands – our children’s education is far too important not to benefit from advances that are already delivering remarkable results across society, from helping police identify criminals to improving cancer screening in our NHS.
“These tools show just how far AI can go in our classrooms – not replacing teachers with robots, but freeing up valuable time for those vital student interactions.
”My ambition is for every teacher in the country to be using AI to deliver a world-class education in the next few years, boosting standards and helping us deliver our Plan for Change.”
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