🤖📚 Lab4U Effect: Students’ grades increased, and the failure rate decreased
By Lab4U Team
In an unprecedented 2024 collaboration, INACAP and Lab4U lead a pilot program that showcased the power of Artificial Intelligence that revolutionize physics education within technical-professional training. Implemented across seven Inacap campuses throughout Chile, the project seamlessly integrated AI tools, smartphone-based scientific experimentation, and active learning methodologies. This innovative approach led to significant improvements in student participation, academic performance, and the overall teaching and learning experience.
By focusing on connecting classroom learning with the skills demanded by the professional world, this initiative lays the groundwork for a new approach to technical education in Chile and the wider region.
💡 Why transform physics education?
Physics remains one of the most challenging STEM subjects for high school and higher education students. Its teaching, often focused on expository classes, presents difficulties in connecting with the real-world work context. This is especially critical in careers such as Mining, Mechanics, or Automation, where understanding the physical phenomena is key to future performance.
Given this scenario, INACAP and Lab4U set out to redesign the learning experience through a solution that blends AI, practical learning, and personalized formative assessment.
🚀 The solution: Lab4U AI applied for active learning
Lab4U developed a technological tool ecosystem focused on facilitating teachers work and enhancing student learning in Mechanical Physics with industry-aligned content:
- AI Resource Generator: A platform that allows simple and personalized creation of exercises, guides, and activities aligned with each career’s graduate profile.
- Lab4U Experience: More than 70 practical activities using mobile phone sensors to experiments with key general physics concepts in real-time.
- Integrated Quizzes: Automated formative assessments that enable real-time learning monitoring with immediate feedback.
- TutorIA: A conversational virtual assistant that supports students in problem-solving with step-by-step guidance.
This combination of tools were implemented over 5 weeks in 3 career fields (Automation and Robotics, Mechanics, Mining) with the participation of 11 teachers, 5 of whom were trained as Champion leaders.
📊 Quantified Results and promise of scalability
The obtained metrics speak for themselves:
- +31% increase in grades in the principal evaluation,.
- Reduccion of 5 percentage points in failure rate.
- More than 70 formative assesments applied with an avarage success of 71%.
- Almost 30 personalized resources, generated by AI, created for teachers.
- 251 directly students impacted in 7 campuses of Inacap at the national level.
These results confirm that the use of AI in educational settings can have a significant impact on academic performance, student participation, and teaching quality by offering relevant, contextualized, and scalable resources.
👩🏫 Teachers as protagonists of change
A key aspect of the pilot program was the continuous support provided to the teaching team. Through training sessions, regular feedback, and intuitive tools, teachers didn’t just integrate new technologies; they transformed their approach to planning, evaluating, and motivating their students
Remarkably, 100% of participating teachers created their own resources on the Lab4U platform. They also reported significant improvements in both student motivation and the comprehension of abstract concepts.
🌎 Shaping a more inclusive, practical, and personalized technical-professional education
Beyond the quantitative results, this pilot marks a milestone in the design of educational experiences that are more relevant and connected to the future of work. The ability of these tools to adapt to different careers, campuses, and learning paces opens the door to a more equitable and effective education.
Lab4U’s proposal, summarized as learning by doing, with real data, in the real world, demonstrates that technical education can be as rigorous as it is inspiring. And that artificial intelligence, when applied correctly, does not replace the teacher: it empowers them
🔗 ¿Want to learn more?
📘Download the complete white paper of the INACAP pilote with Lab4U (in progress)
🧪What the Chilean Press says about Lab4U Effect (in spanish, Diario Financiero)
