The multilevel Darwinist brain (MDB) is a cognitive architecture that follows an evolutionary approach to provide autonomous robots with lifelong adaptation. It has been tested in real robot on-line learning scenarios obtaining successful results that reinforce the evolutionary principles that constitute the main original contribution of the MDB. This preliminary work has lead to a series of improvements in the computational implementation of the architecture so as to achieve realistic operation in real time, which was the biggest problem of the approach due to the high computational cost induced by the evolutionary algorithms that make up the MDB core. The current implementation of the architecture is able to provide an autonomous robot with real time learning capabilities and the capability for continuously adapting to changing circumstances in its world, both internal and external, with minimal intervention of the designer. This paper aims at providing an overview or the architecture and its operation and defining what is required in the path towards a real cognitive robot following a developmental strategy. The design, implementation and basic operation of the MDB cognitive architecture are presented through some successful real robot learning examples to illustrate the validity of this evolutionary approach.

This paper presents a proposal of specific curriculum in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for high school students, which has been organized as a two-year subject. The curriculum was designed based on two premises. The first one is that, although the proposal is targeted to scientific programmes, the involved students and teachers do not have any previous knowledge about AI. Accordingly, the teaching units have been designed with the aim of supporting teachers in a new discipline for them and, in addition, providing an introductory level to students. The main didactical objective is to establish the fundamentals of AI from a practical perspective, learning technical concepts by using them to solve specific problems. The approach that has been followed in the teaching units is focused on developing embedded intelligence solutions, that is, programming real-world devices which interact with real environments. To this end, and to address a second fundamental premise of low investment capability at schools, it has been decided to use Smartphones as the central technological element to implement such embedded intelligence at classes. This curriculum has been developed within the Erasmus + project entitled "AI + : Developing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum adapted to European High School". The project was carried out by a team of AI experts and high school teachers who created the teaching units, and a group of students that tested them for three years, providing feedback to make the curriculum feasible for its introduction in schools in the short-term. The main results obtained from its implementation within the project scope are presented and discussed here, with the aim of contributing to the AIEd community progress by means of a practical pilot experience. Although the curriculum has been designed and tested at European level, it has been created with a general perspective of AI education, so it can be applied worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a major social impact in the coming years, affecting today’s professions and our daily routines. In the short-term, education is one of the most impacted areas. The autonomous decision making that can be achieved with tools based on AI implies that some of the traditional methodologies associated with the fundamentals of the learning process in students, must be reviewed. Consequently, the role of teachers in the classroom may change, as they will have to deal with such AI tools performing parts of their work, and with students making a common use of them. In this scope, the AI in Education (AIEd) community agrees on the key relevance of developing AI literacies to train teachers and students of all educational levels in the fundamentals of this new technological discipline, so they can understand how these tools based on AI work and pilot the adaptation in an informed way. This implies teaching students about the fundamentals of topics like perception, representation, reasoning, learning, and the impact of AI, with the aim of delivering a solid formation in this area. To support them, formal teaching and learning resources must be developed and tested with students, properly adapted to different educational levels. The main contribution of this proposal lies in the presentation of the Robobo Project, a technological tool based on intelligent robotics that supports such formal AI literacy training for a wide range of ages, from secondary school to higher education. The core part of this paper is focused on showing the possibilities the Robobo Project offers to teachers in a simple way, and how it can be adapted to different levels and skills, leading to a long-term educational proposal. Validation results that support the feasibility of this technology in the education about AI, obtained with students and teachers in different educational levels during a period of six years, are presented and discussed.